A proposal is made for the use of contextual information in the machine translation of Japanese and English. This paper describes the use of a Context Monitor to nlaintaill contextual infortmttion dyn,'unically and the ~tugmenlalion of appropriate features to ~t semantic network to enahh~ simple inference. The al}proach taken is that {}t" "best gucs~?' processing with the cont~extual information being hal~dled with semantic inf{~rmalion on ~ shallow level. 2 Introduction Current Machine qh'anslatiou (MT) systems proc,~ss input sentence by sentence. I[owever, experience wil.h English and Japanese has shown that some languages difl'er to such a degree that sentential translation yiehls poor results, l,eL us first compare the results of a conventional MT sysl.em with those we expect, t,o get for MT with context: t. J::q'lJf]~-._-i~¢{:¢/,?)[ b v,-)-1/~3-'.~E~gfi £" 2)i L v, K 2. K-7: ~t-laJaS'd?,l~ ~a ~t~.I;~y b t:: o 4. k-c g ];! (5'~ko This might be translated by a current, machine tl'anslation system as shown in Figure 11: It can clearly l)e seen that meaning in IHally seI/tenees is obscured. Let us compare this with I.he resuits of a system using simple cont.exl.ual informal,ion ms shown in Figure 2: This secol/d translation is i-tlllch Ill(H'(? CO]lO['{~ll{. ;IH{I better preserves the meaning of the original se,lten{'o. An attempt has therefore I}een made to solve some of tile problems of translal.ing languages SllCIt sis Japanese and English using contextual information. Due to [.he consideral.ions of wanting to produce a high quality small-sized MT system, lhe approach taken is to use tile resources awdlahle in an exisl;ing MT system and to process the contextu;d i,l['orlmd.ion l There is obviously n great difference in results Imtweet, systems, hnl, l.hese translat.icms relweSent tyl}iCal {uHe, llted) r~.stdts fi'om a numher of systems, a) and I}) options,hq}end on the default settings of individual systems