Recent innovations in NTT's statistical machine translation

English and Japanese have very different word orders, and they are probably one of the most difficult language pairs to translate. We developed a new method of translating English to Japanese that takes advantage of the head-final linguistic nature of Japanese. It first changes the word order in an English sentence into that of a Japanese sentence and then translates the reordered English sentence into Japanese. We found that our method dramatically improved the accuracy of English-to-Japanese translation. We also found that the method is highly effective for Chinese-to-Japanese translation.