Going forward, we will continue with research and development, aiming to achieve a system that can produce higher-quality translations, even for difficult-to-translate Japanese such as live news reports containing colloquial spoken language. When the service is provided, it can be accessed via a banner on the NHK WORLD-JAPAN website and on the app. It will be used in the case of an earthquake of seismic intensity of lower 5 or above or when an emergency warning is issued such as a tsunami advisory, tsunami warning, major tsunami warning, or heavy rain warning. The AI English subtitling service is intended for non-Japanese residents and visitors to Japan. NHK launched a new AI English subtitling service in June 2022 using this Japanese-English AI translation system to add English subtitles to special news reports on General TV to be streamed live online. It also adjusts the wording in line with English news reports, such as converting wind speeds (from meters per second to kilometers per hour) and expressing dates within one week as days of the week. Because the training data include many news reports about weather-related natural disasters such as heavy rain, the system can correctly translate most news reports about weather-related disasters.

To produce high-quality translations, the AI system has been trained with one million pairs of parallel NHK news sentences in Japanese and English. This is a specialized system to translate NHK’s Japanese news into English. Using an AI translation system to generate English subtitles for live-streamed special news in emergenciesĪt NHK STRL, we have been researching and developing a Japanese-English AI (artificial intelligence) translation system for news in order to support the production of English news for NHK’s global service.

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