English-Japanese machine translation

A fully transistorized computer for the purpose of experimental machine translation from English to Japanese was recently completed, and a program test is now being conducted. This paper describes the organization of this special purpose computer named Yamato as well as the translation principles and the program flow diagrams. Yamato, whose switching elements use 600 transistors and 7,000 germanium diodes, can work with both variable and fixed word length, executes 46 different instructions of a one-plus-one address code and stores data on a magnetic drum holding 820,000 bits. This drum holds four dictionaries: word, idiom, syntax, and Japanese word, as well as a translation program of about 4,000 words of 32 bits. Upon consulting the word dictionary , each word of a given sentence is transformed into an eight character item of information which includes its grammatical features and the location of the corresponding Japanese word. Since the grammatical structures of the two languages are quite different, word for word translation, such as might be possible between European languages, is generally unsuccessful. The program described is designed to find the grammatical structure of the given English sentence and to transpose the words in it so as to meet the corresponding Japanese grammar. After the transposition is made, each eight character word is translated into Japanese with the use of the fourth dictionary, and then typed out. It takes about ten seconds to translate a simple sentence such as "I have some eggs in my hand", including the time required for input and output.