Abstract
International communication is supported by steady efforts of students of languages. It was a good news that Dr. Makoto Nagao was awarded with STFJ's Japan Prize 2005 for his contribution to machine translation, an important tool for overcoming the language barrier. While being already commercialized in some fields such as translation of scientific and technological documents, the technology needs further development for more general applications, and will never be almighty. Yet machine translation is expected to help not only international communication but also our understanding of language.
