Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Project Babylon: Universal Translator
silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect...
Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"
Yeah, wasting an exorbitant amount of tax dollars, sure. Like the internet.
Be cynical as you want, but DARPA is the one government agency which is really flexible and has a vision. With the rise of corporate dependency on innovation, even in the academic world, DARPA is one of the last bastions of basic research. Get with it.
(emphasis added)
Does this set off alarm bells for anyone? Those are complicated languages, and I believe Mandarin in particular is EXTREMELY tonal (i.e., doesn't work well in speech recognition).
Look, just imagine which you get out of Babelfish. Now take it a few levels up, to speech. Does this proposal in any way sound achievable? (again, pun unintended)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
"The real problem is that semantics (meaning) is more difficult to translate between languages"
Agreed. What will probably happen is that people will initially have to be trained to use these machines. "Instead of using the term 'kicks ass' (which will translate as abusing a donkey...), use the term 'defeat'."
"Derp de derp."
Ah......another nice subsidy for high tech industry, funded by the generosity of American taxpayers.
I'd much rather see them give it to Linda Park (Hoshi Sato on 'Enterprise'). She's the one who really made the universal translators famous. On TOS, the concept was mostly ignored ("They always worked perfectly -- Yeah! That's the story!"). On Enterprise, she does the translating almost as often as the translator does.
Besides, I'd much rather see her recieving the thing in a newscast than Shatner (she's cuter!).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I guess it's the most sickening yet use of the "terrorist" catch-word for getting public support.
This is quite offensive.
-twb
I am impressed with the attempt to try to get a two way translator packed into a little box, but I don't think it's going to be much of a success. I gather the sudden need for computational translation is because the military simply has too few people who speak the languages of the areas that they cover. I also assume that this is in direct relation to the FBI/CIA etc requesting Pashto and Arabic speakers to come forward and help them after 9/11 last year and the difficulties in understanding a lot of the folk in Afghanistan who speak three major different languages (Pashto, Dari and Uzbek) with a whole bunch of dialects.
Sadly I think that it will be a waste of time. I speak six languages and at least one of them, Swiss-German, is not even a written language and here in Switzerland there about three major dialects of the language, some of which are not 100% mutually intelligible, and this in a Swiss-German population of about 5 million. I think that this system will run into the same sort of problems with languages like Arabic which has enormous dialectic variations in dialects say, from Algeria to Syria and people from the various areas can often not understand one another well. No one speaks classical Arabic of the Quran in day to day language use.
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions. This would have, amongst other things , the positive side effect that soldiers (some of them at least) would be better able to understand the culture and the situation of the local people where they are stationed. Not only this but people in all the countries I've lived in have reacted much, much better to me when I've tried to learn their language instead of being the usual culturally ignorant Anglo Tourist who expects everyone to speak English. I would argue that the general western ignorance (especially amongst English speakers) is one of the causes of the percieved arrogance seen by many third worlders. Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software.
Presumably they are trying to paralell the tower of babylon and the twin towers. Supposedly, the tower of babylon failed because the builders could not speak to one another.
Their logo seems to be implying that sept 11 could have been prevented with better communication and understanding of language. Like the TOB, the WTC might not have fallen if people could actually speak to one another (or gather better intelligence, or not anger other nationalities, etc, etc). The 'remember' at the bottom also seems to back this up - trying to tie the lessons of the past to the events of the present.
It's the fire-breathing cat I can't figure out.
maybe it means that through better communication the whole mess could have been avoided?
not.
so we're okay with the government reading all our transmissions now? what if instead we found out why people were willing to kill themselves for their cause, and see if we can come to any basic understandment on that level, before spending vast amounts of energy on symptoms of the basic cause?
Just think how much farther along we'd be technically (read: your life more convenient) if we devoted all the energy and capital we spend on law enforcement now, on space exploration, or virtual reality...