Re: A truly multilingual WWW

>Unless you store bunsetsu boundaries and yomi (phonetic reading) along
>with the original text, you can pretty much forget about automatic
>transliteration of Japanese (or Chinese for that matter).

Well, 100% accurate transliteration, or transcription, like 100%
accurate machine translation, is one of those "hard" problems.

I have seen systems that can take a paragraph of kana and convert it
into kanji, or take a paragraph of kanji, and convert it into kana.
The accuracy is about 98%.

I have also seen machine translation systems working on PC's that can
achieve readable, if not grammatically correct English and Japanese. 

Resource usage for the above systems is still fairly high: about on
par with a typical Microsoft application in fact :-)

Not impossible, not impractical, but not 100% perfect either. Hmm,
sounds familiar...