Canon CanoWord 65W Japanese-English Word Processor

The Canon CanoWord 65W Japanese-English Word Processor is a sophisticated dual-language word processor with printer functionality and operation manuals (in Japanese). The device allows the user to type in Japanese (hiragana), but also to type a character in the European alphabet (romaji) and then see a window which displays the Japanese characters (hiragana) which might be relevant. The original user, a Japanese urologist, brought the item to England when he came to work in a UK hospital and gifted it to a second owner, who used it in the mid to late 1990s.

Dating from 1991, the Canon CanoWord 65W Japanese-English Word Processor is a sophisticated dual-language word processor with printer functionality.

The device allows the user to type in Japanese (hiragana), but also to type a character in the European alphabet (romaji) and then see a window which displays the Japanese characters (hiragana) which might be relevant. The item was originally purchased by a Japanese urologist who brought the item to England when he moved here for a few years for a placement at a hospital. He had no further need of it when he returned to Japan and so gifted it to the second owner who used it in the mid to late 1990s.

The Canon CanoWord 65W Japanese-English Word Processor is an early example of portable electronic machine translation systems, computation software which is used to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. It is also an example of how this hardware and software became more portable and mobile in the early 1990s and also began to become multi-function devices, in this case with the addition of a inbuilt printing function.