German is spoken by about 95 million people worldwide, and is the official language of Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland. It probably ranks sixth in number of native speakers among the languages of the world (after Chinese, English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish and Russian). German is widely studied as a foreign language. English and German both belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Since they are so closely related, they share many features. German is an inflected language. In contrast to Latin, the inflection sometimes affects not only the word ending but also its stem, making declension and conjugation slightly more difficult. In the German orthography all nouns and most words that take the syntactical function of nouns are capitalized.
The German alphabet contains the same 26 letters as the English alphabet, plus the umlauted letters: ä, ö, ü, and the ß.
Japan may not be the best in the world when it comes to speaking English, but it remains a pioneer in developing cutting-edge translation technology.
With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaching, the nation is once again plotting to surprise the world, this time with high-quality, real-time machine translation systems.
Public and private institutions are working eagerly to develop and upgrade the technology so it can easily be used by tourists, whose numbers are growing sharply
There is nothing especially novel about machine translation, a technology that reaches back to 1951, when a team from IBM and Georgetown University first demonstrated a computer’s ability to translate short phrases from English into Russian. In 63 years, the machines involved in machine translation have evolved. What a warehouse-sized computer could do in 1951, a laptop can do even better today.