Japan’s Ministry of Justice has long been committed to promoting the translation of Japanese laws to facilitate international exchange and legal transparency. However, the Ministry faces challenges in translation efficiency due to a lack of dedicated English translators.
To address this issue, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation of Japan announced a significant development on December 1, 2023, revealing that their independently developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) legal translation system has begun serving Japan’s Ministry of Justice. The system’s development began in April 2023, with plans for an initial trial run before its official implementation across various government departments in Japan by April 2024.
Traditionally, the production of English versions of the more than 900 laws and regulations issued by the Ministry of Justice has taken up to two and a half years. One of the main reasons for this prolonged timeline is the time-consuming nature of drafting the initial English translations, often undertaken by staff within respective government departments rather than professional translators.
In order to expedite the production of English versions, Japan’s Ministry of Justice began considering the integration of AI translation technology as early as 2019. Following careful consideration of translation accuracy and extensive research, the Ministry decided to adopt the system developed by Toshiba in 2022.
AI translation in the legal field has long been challenging due to the complex nature of legal documents, which often include lengthy sentences, annotations, and omitted subjects. To overcome these challenges, Toshiba’s translation system combines proprietary natural language processing technology with the latest neural translation models developed by the Advanced Speech Translation Research and Development Promotion Center (ASTREC), a subsidiary of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan. This integration enables the system to better adapt to legal translation requirements, improving both translation quality and efficiency.
The system underwent quality assessment, achieving an impressive BLEU score of 54.89, indicating its breakthrough in overcoming traditional AI translation challenges in the legal domain, thereby achieving accurate and natural legal translation.
In addition to providing high-quality translation services, the system also includes editing functionality, allowing translated content to be formatted into documents for easy verification by the Ministry of Justice and other government departments, further enhancing overall work efficiency.
In conclusion, the introduction of the Toshiba AI Legal Translation System will significantly advance the Ministry of Justice’s legal translation efforts, providing robust support for the Japanese government to showcase and communicate its legal system more effectively on the international stage.
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