The Rupo JW-V700, a personal word processor launched by Toshiba in 1995, was notable for its assisted English-Japanese translation function that took scanned documents in English from its OCR function and translated them into Japanese. It also featured the industry’s best AI dictionary, the Hyper AI dictionary, with 1.86 million candidate words and an intricate parsing routine that was able to finely classify the parts of speech for extremely accurate kana-kanji conversions. According to Toshiba’s estimates, the JW-V700 had a 98 percent kana-kanji conversion success rate.
The assisted English-Japanese translation function could translate English text files as well as OCR-scanned English documents. It used a built-in 61,000-word translation dictionary. The OCR function could recognize both English and Japanese text and could even read multi-column documents and business cards.
