  Recently, several types of Japanese-to-English machine translation systems
have been developed, but all of them require an initial process of rewriting
the original text into easily translatable Japanese. Therefore these systems
are unsuitable for translating information that needs to be speedily
disseminated. To overcome this limitation, a Multi-Level Translation Method
based on the Constructive Process Theory has been proposed. This paper
describes the benefits of using this method in the Japanese-to-English machine
translation system ALT-J/E.
  In comparison with conventional compositional methods, the Multi-Level
Translation Method emphasizes the importance of the meaning contained in
expression structures as a whole. It is shown to be capable of translating
typical written Japanese based on the meaning of the text in its context, with
comparative ease. We are now hopeful of carrying out useful machine translation
with no manual pre-editing.

Computation and Language;Computation and Language