Japanese Linguistics and Car-Navigation Technology

In the last two years we at our institute in Tübingen have been developing a series of car-navigation tools for Japanese with the enterprise Temic (Ulm) for the new series of BMW. This lecture reports not only our advances achieving our goal in speech recognition but our problems and achievements with application of Japanese and European phonological and lexicological frameworks to applied linguistics. Presenting our project we can show that cumbersome philology and future oriented modern speech recognition technology are both necessary not only for applied linguistics but also for cultural and economical exchange.
As a result of our experiment we can state that we desperately need scientific projects and practical research to create technological and lexicological systems capable of overcoming the barriers in the Japanese and Western perception of Japanese “words” .

Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo is Professor of Japanese Linguistics at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and Co-director of Tübingen University Center for Japanese Language at Dôshisha University. Her research interests are wide and include discourse and cognitive studies, history of Japanese linguistics, lexicology, Japanese name culture, information technology and Japanese as a language of science, language in intercultural context, European-Japanese scientific contacts, Japanese cultural influence in Europe. Her latest publication is From Rodriguez to Computational Linguistics – Japanese in European Linguistics and The Emergence of Knowledge of Chinese and Sino-Japanese as Classical Languages of Science: Linguistic Treatment of Botanical Terminology.