NEC, Japan has announced the development of automatic translation software for mobile phones, which can provide Japanese to English translations of phrases useful for travel. For processing, the software does not require a server or any other external devices but only a processor for mobile phones. If a Japanese phrase is spoken into the handset, the text of the phrase will be displayed on the screen using voice recognition. It takes about one second for a voice recognition result to be displayed after the phrase is spoken. Then, if translation is commanded, the text will be translated into English and displayed in about one second. The software consists of a voice recognition engine, a translation engine and the middleware that controls these two engines.

NEC tested the software on its "SIMPURE N1" mobile phone, which was released from NTT DoCoMo Inc in 2006, and confirmed its successful operation, NEC said. The middleware that controls the voice recognition and translation engines allows the translation capability to be accessed and used though other mobile phone applications such as mailer and browser.