Apple Expected to Introduce ‘Kanji Talk’

Apple Computer is expected to announce today that it will offer its “Kanji Talk” Japanese-language system on Macintosh personal computers sold in the United States.

Analysts said the first introduction of a kanji-based system in this country should make it easier for companies doing business in both Japan and the United States to send computer messages and files over Macintosh computers.

One of the barriers to widespread use of PCs in Japan, analysts say, is the difficulty of accommodating the computer to the 10,000-character kanji alphabet. For obvious reasons, traditional Roman letter-style keyboards, where each character in the alphabet gets its own key, are out.

Personal computer makers have attempted to solve the problem in a variety of ways. Apple’s system puts the phonetic components of the kanji symbols on the keyboard. A computer program changes the components to full characters as they are typed.