This study describes one of the world's successful speech-to-speech machine translation systems. This system accepts speaker-independent continuous speech, and produces translations as audio output. Subsequent versions of this machine translation system have been implemented on several massively parallel computers, and these systems have attained translation performance in the milliseconds range. The success of this project triggered several massively parallel projects, as well as other massively parallel artificial intelligence projects throughout the world. Dr. Hiroaki Kitano received the distinguished "Computers and Thought Award" from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in 1993 for his work in this area, and that work is reported in this book.