Keynote Speech

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very pleased to be able to be with you at the inauguration of this new and exciting venture which is the Universal Networking Language (UNL) Foundation.

I may be the most suitable person to help celebrate this event here because I am Japanese and very bad at foreign languages. You cannot imagine how bad the Japanese are at speaking foreign languages. There are many reasons: Japanese is quite different from any Western language; we were taught English by other Japanese, we were taught English grammar, but we were not taught how to speak and how to make conversation in English. I have spent a lot of time and energy on learning English. If I could have spent all that time for other things, my life would have been different. Therefore it was always my dream to, one day, have an automatic translation machine.

Back in the days when I was helping to introduce telecoms competition into Japan, and privatize NTT, I had an idea to use funds acquired through the privatization of NTT and invest them in the development of an automatic translation telephone so that no one would have to learn languages anymore for day-to-day contact. The problem was getting someone to support the idea. I approached a famous scholar at Tokyo University who is an adviser to the Government. He said that it could not be done. According to him it had been logically proven that it was impossible, so therefore it was morally impossible for him as a scholar to support the idea. I begged him. But he refused.

But that didn’t stop me. Some time later, I mentioned the idea directly to the Minister who was to speak at a Conference in Nice. He found it politically appealing and accepted to use it in his speech. By coincidence, the then Chairman of NEC was watching television in his hotel room in Germany and was surprised to see a Japanese Minister backing an idea he also had. When I met him he told me he had tried to get NEC to make a translation phone, but had no takers.

After long negotiations within the Government and between political decision makers in Japan, thanks to the support of the chairman of NEC, Mr Kobayashi and others, I was able to establish the Advanced International Telecommunication Research Institute, ATR International, in Kansai with the money the Government obtained through selling shares of NTT. And it was at the ATR International that in 1985 they started the development of an automatic translation telephone. But, they have not been able to come up with a satisfactory machine yet.

The famous scholar’s opinion might have been correct, but I still have my dream.

Today, voice recognition is getting better and better. Getting a computer to recognize a person’s voice is easy, but a phone has to understand an infinite number of different voices. A phone must be able to cope with a lack of grammar and translate in real time. Thanks to the recent development of technologies, these problems are becoming solvable by super computers.

ITU has been focusing on third generation for some time now. As you may know, third generation mobile has a broad high-speed capacity which can even access a super computer with a very high capacity of voice recognition and automatic translation, once such a computer is developed. So I do think that my dream of an automatic translation telephone is getting closer and closer to becoming reality.

In the ITU, the expenditure related to languages is almost 40 %. This is mostly the cost of translation for six official languages by simultaneous interpreters, by translators and editors. If this translation work could be done by a machine, you can imagine how efficient the work of international organizations would be. Those with advanced languages skills could be deployed into other areas of common understanding, perhaps even working to perfect the machine models.

I am in full support of the initiatives of the UNL Foundation. We are trying to introduce partially remote translation, but it is through using costly human beings. Human beings should be able to work in areas where machines cannot go. We should do more. More to ensure that machines do the tasks of humans beings, so that human beings can concentrate on looking after the progress of humanity. In this exciting digital world, what better way to empower communication among people than through a performant digital language!

I wish you all the very best for the success of your Symposium so that not only my dream, but the dreams of future generations may come true.

Thank you.

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