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Spoken Japanese-English translation Using Your PDA
Ewann writes "Yet another step closer to the universal translator: Digitimes is reporting that NEC has announced trials of software for your PDA that listens to spoken English and Japanese phrases, translates them, and re-speaks them in the other language. Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo."
The Correct Link
Sig: CompuNotes Rocks what else should I say?
I can't wait until we can get one of these that can speak spanish, mandarin, etc. I live in LA, and people speak at least a dozen languages at me every day.
--
pants ahoy
How does it translate: "All your base are belong to us"?
looks like the poster made a mistake here is the link to the actual article
link
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I think that could be very useful. Of course, it won't compare with this.
Can't wait until this stuff is declassified.
the article's short on detail, though. Which PDAs can handle this? It seems a processor intensive task, so I'm guessing there would be some pretty significant delay - it's hard to imagine it being realtime.
It seems voice recognition software is still in it's infancy as it is, how feasible is it to start building things on top of something that barely works as it is?
To quote Monty Python:
I quote on example. The Hungarian phrase meaning "Can you direct me to the station?" is translated by the English phrase, "Please fondle my bum."
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
is not your strong point, huh, smart guy?
If you're asking yourself, "why do we really need this," or if you're just a caucasian who likes anime and is just browsing Slashdot, here is why we need this!
now i can freak out japanese schoolgirls in perfect understanding of my intentions.
- colin
Which district? There are significantly different dialects of Nihon'go spread throughout Tokyo itself, let alone the northern and southern parts of the country. Try learning some basic Japanese before journeying to Japan. You PDA will likely end up calling a 30+year lady an "oban-san" and that's the last thing you want in Japan. :)
Why bother.
it seems really cool, and the article is a little light on details, however they say it covers words and phrases that would be good for travellers. I imagine that this uses the same type of thing that phone systems do, like "press or say 1 to talk to sales" that sort of thing. more audio pattern recognition. I can't wait until it can be used for more stuff such as business meetings, casual conversations and stuff...
sucky sucky 5 dolla? me love you long time.
Step 1: I go to Japan ;) )
Step 2: I go to a store
Step 3: I tell my PDA "How much is a new Pentium 5"? (they'll be out by the time I can afford to go to Japan
Step 4: The PDA thinks for 20 minutes
Step 5: It says something in Japanese
Step 6: I end up infront of a firing squad
Step 7: I tell my PDA "Please don't shoot, this is just a missunderstanding!"
Step 8: The PDA thinks another 20 minutes
Step 9: They shoot me now as opposed to at sunrise tomarrow
Seriously though, this will be need if it works, but I doubt that the PDAs will be powerfull enough to do it with any reasonable speed. Desktop's maybe...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Stealth is the real advantage. Use a single earbud headphone, and make it look like it's coming out of your cellphone. Then you'll be able to eavesdrop in on the restaurant waiters while they laugh at your bad pronounciation, and find out if the chicks dig your American vibe.
I wonder if the translations sound as stilted as Babelfish - I don't know that I'd be able to keep a straight face while I used this thing.
What's your damage, Heather?
>Yet another step closer to the universal translator Unless they've made any headway scanning brain wave frequencies this won't do much for making the Star Trek UT.
what if they speak to fast like six, from the show blossom
*huh* Sig? WTF?
Me using PDA: "So, how are you?"
Translation: Me love you long time.
when it speaks back to you,it'll probably be in a robotic monotonic voice
if you replicate that (which you will if you have no experience with the language) nobody will be able to understand you
go ahead. try it on your friends. in english.
They had this device in a Richie Rich comic 15-20 years ago. How 80's.
Good! Maybe I can finally understand that "Chick a Me Chi, the Chinese Chicken" song. :P
Get into the really cool strip clubs in Tokyo? Nothing has been able to get me in yet!
>"Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo."
I can just imagine:
You:
PDA:
Since it can apparently speak both lanugages, it should really add a confirmation step.
In English, I say:
Where can I find a car?
In English, it confirms:
Where can I find a cart?
In English, I repeat, clearer:
No, where can I find a car?
In English, it confirms:
Where can I find a car?
In English, I say:
Yes
Finally, in Japan, it says:
Where can I find a car?
Otherwise, if I ask to buy a cheap train pass, I might actually be buying something else.
--
clambert
I once worked next door to the translation department for a major japanese computer house. The translators used to use me as a technical resource. One particular time, a translator looked at the japanese and translated the words as "fingering the ulimate nothingness that underlies everything". This was from part of some C programming instructions. Took me nearly eight hours to figure out that the phrase was "pointer to void". Automatic translation will be a joke for a long time to come.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
"Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo."
Or next time I pretend I am going to Tokyo but actually in my dorm lacking quarters to pay for laundry, let alone a trip to Japansville.
You don't care that i'm broke? you will once you need to buy toast at Ames.
>"Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo."
I can just imagine:
You: "Pardon me Ms. Schoolgirl, where can I buy some seafood?"
PDA: "I shall violate you with my massive tentacles!"
(note: previosu post was an error; I had put the quotes in 's . doh!)
... will it?
"Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo" Could you imagine the deviancy that would occur if Katz got hold of one of these?
- Are your mommy and daddy at home now?
- No officer, I didn't put that goat in a kimono.
- Hello, Emergency? My penis is stuck in the spout of a bonsai tree watering can.
And so on and so forth...For those of you who don't read Japanese, I give you a bit more info on this. Based upon what I read here (Yahoo News Japan), it is a Pocket PC 2002 (which is no surprise, as NEC makes one of these in Japan). They are also hoping to make versions for other languages as well. What's written there seems the original Japanese of the post in Digitimes. And here is the press release from NEC.
Based upon what it says on NEC's press release, it works via voice recognition, not via phone as somebody suggested. It is tuned to understand standard American English (whatever that means) and standard Japanese (which is well defined). The recognition is based upon common words used for tourists, so if you try to translate technical terms, it probably wont' understand you at all. Just like many voice recognition, the way how you speak will determine the accuracy of voice recognition (with a thick accent, you won't go anywhere).
They will have special booth set up for this for evaluation of the technology in Narita Airport in late June.
It probably works via voice recognition and translation engine. Voice recognition is something that has been being developed everywhere as you know. English-Japanese translation engine is something that Japanese has been working on for a number of years, as Japanese is very different from any other language, and pretty much useless outside of Japan, as nobody else speaks Japanese.
Based upon my experience with these translation engines I have seen in Japan, they work very poorly. You will get most ideas across, but the sentences are very unnatural at best, often incomprehensive. Of course, these are often a lot better than English written by most Japanese. I personally think it is nearly impossible to make really good English-Japanese bi-directional translation engine, as Japanese grammers are so erratic and loose.
Of course, these devices/softwares probably are better than nothing if you know absolutely nothing about the language...
No one actually speaks it though.
There once was a tower called Babel...
And lets not forget... "It depends on what your meaning of 'is' is."
for 'Bukkake' is in English?
Fuck Off Everyone
Sweet! I can use it to translate my anime (no self-respecting nerd would even consider watching the dub!) and Japanese pop music!
Assuming it translates smarter than Babelfish and some of the crazy entries at Animelyrics, this would be an excellent device indeedy. Do you suppose it would outputs only in Romajii, though? What about katakana, hiragana and kanji? Nevermind, authenticity isn't anywhere near as important as Pocky, DiGi Charat and Hapatai.
Yatta, yatta...
Japanese slashdot
Babelfish Translation
--
I hope this isn't the same interpreter they used for Zero Wing...
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!"
What if your PDA doesn't have a built-in audio hardware support?
http://www.palmzone.net
haha, funny sig. Reminds me of this Penny Arcade.
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
I thought it was funny.
like an origami boulder
And it might be good for picking up on the hot chic with the Stephen Hawking fetish in Japanese class...
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
- Hello? ...
- Heh, no you dumb! Talk closer or it wont work...
- Hmmmkay, aham, erm, let me try some simple words first
- Key!
- Ki!
- Er... what?
- Lighter!
- Lai-ta!
- What the...
- KeyHolder!
- Ki-horu-da!
- Hey, you got the recorder, you idiot!
We could hook this up to an anime title and have a fan dub. I mean, nevermind all the voices would be changed into one computer one, and 50% of the story would be lost, and...oh...blast..
Does this mean that we can figure out what the following phrases actually mean(?): a.Someone set up us the bomb, b.Main Screen turn on, c.All your base are belong to us.
I guess that would require a Japanese->English->Japanese translator.
-Sean
People should stop being lazy. If you want to speak a foreign langauge, just learn the damn language. It's not that hard to do when you really need to (even Japanese).
when it speaks back to you,it'll probably be in a robotic monotonic voice
No it won't. Software synthesizers have been able to apply prosody (the rise and fall of pitch) since the 1980s, starting with SAM for the C=64 and Apple II. Listen to "The Laziest Men on Mars - Invasion of the Gabber Robots.mp3" once. Note that Cats is the only character with a monotonic voice; all other characters have half-natural voices thanks to SoftVoice's superior technology. (Yes, it was SoftVoice; go to softvoice's web site and play the Colossus sample to see who did the voice for Cats.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most people have the ability to learn at least SOME of another language if they want to. Depending on your workplace, learning another language might be a powerful career move, too. I'm not going to trust some gadget to speak for me in a language I don't understand! What if your PDA got hacked? Hahaha.
Language is a product for person to person communication, and human communication is all about context, facial expressions, body language, and it is going to be a long long time before we get a babelfish. There won't be puffs of logic anytime soon! Hehe.
Just take a night class. They should teach more languages in public schools, or let students pick..
..don't panic
Finally, I can watch the Zed team without going to dbzoa.net!
Have you read my journal today?
From the article: "The trial service will be demonstrated during the South Korea/Japan-hosted soccer World Cup 2002 (May 31-June 31)".
;-)
I'll be sure to grab mine before June 31st rolls around.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
We have the right to use weapons of mass destruction against these evil nations and the man to do it is George W. Bush. We need to drop nukes on those jap bastards again, but this drop enough to vaporize the entire wretched nation. Next, we need to drop napalm onto those Palestians and burn the into the pavement. It's our *RIGHT* to kill anyone we want who is a foreigner for *ANY* reason. Deal with it you worthless eurotrash. We are #1.
'nuff said.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
NEC has announced trials of software for your PDA that listens to spoken English and Japanese phrases, translates them, and re-speaks them in the other language.
This thing is certain to start another world war.
I think the real test would be to hook one up to your AV system, pop in an import LD, and see if it can handle dialogue like:
"Officer! That adorable moppet has stolen my VF-11 moditransformable Aerotech fighter!"
Most people have the ability to learn at least SOME of another language if they want to.
Most people. . . . Nice phrase there.
:(
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Voice recognition technology cannot identify MY voice and put down the English text for it, how the hell it is supposed to translate it into another language?
The minimal success rate even after hours of training
training program: "Say 'The Cat Jumped Fast.' "
Me: "The cat jumped fast"
Comp: "Error, please say the sentence 'The cat jumped fast.' "
Me: "The cat jumped fast"
Repeat 3-4x
Comp: "Error, you are not saying the phrases as directed on screen, please try again at a later time."
Fuck it. If I say "The cat jumped fast." I know what I said, and the damn computer had better adjust to ME.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
You will be taking it up the ass like the faggot earth-killer you are.
Japan has been trying to come up with tools to do this for a long time. My father in law has a program that attempts to do it (and fails miserably), which runs on CPM.
From my experience learning and speaking Japanese, I think Japanese is a very tight language. Grammar rules have very few exceptions. If you were using translation software to translate between Japanese and another equally strict language, I could fathom it working at some point.
On the other hand, I don't think that Japanese/English translation software can ever work beyond providing just a gist of what is being said or written. English is too radical. Grammar rules are broken almost as often as not and English spelling is goofy to say the least. I think it would be nice if someone could pull it off though.
Best wishes,
James
My thoughts exactly. I have heard several opinions that state that Japanese is better suited for machine translations than most western languages.
And, also, some linguists think that English is definitely not the best language to start thinking of building universal language processors, for the specific reasons you listed. Grammar is not the most easiest to understand (I've been using the language for way over a decade and I still dont' get how some of the prepositions work...) and - ewww, take that ortography back where it came from, please, I'd rather not discuss it while I'm eating.
You build a tool to process a boring language and get a neat end result; you start building an "universal" tool, starting from English and end up creating a monster. This is not intended as a flame, but I'd say that English is not the best language for any job - but it gets used because often it does the job somehow while others may not even get started. Consistent with Internet philosophies, no wonder it's number 1 =)
...
For example, GNU Ispell was originally developed for English, and as a result, there was a little bit of problems when they tried to make it work with Finnish. Unlike English, Finnish is a synthetic language where most grammar forms are formed with suffixes. (The now-traditional haiku example of seven syllables, "juoksentelisinkohan", would mean "I wonder if I should run" - perfect word for describing the stressful life =)
The end result of early Ispell experiments was that the program did take a list of Finnish words, and list of Finnish suffixes, but *any* combination of these was recognized as a valid word, and some completely valid words made using these were rejected!
The experts then said that the best language to start building the spellchecker for might be some Inuit language, forgot which... They wandered to the back room muttering something about agglutination =)
after all, if I were making something like this, I'd be reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal tempted to have it translate "How do I find the nearest bathroom?" to "I have three testicles!" or "I think you're cute, wanna go to my place?" to "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverine."
Maybe it's just me, I dunno.
Someone you trust is one of us.
does it speak like yoda?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Really I think before machine translation is a workable reality, we'll need something like Cyc. To get a real, decent translation simple rule based systems aren't sufficient - you need to be able to translate the languages into logical formulae that can then be reconstructed into the new language. Cyc already has this ability to a limited extent (though only for english), but really, I think this is the way to go.
Learn another language? It's great to learn another language (I've studied several), but what if the second or third language you learned isn't Japanese? You can learn ten languages, but there will still be someplace you can go where you won't speak the language. Then, it's nice to have some kind of translation aid.
as my american friends have taught me, if a person does't understand english, just slower and louder and then they'll understand.
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
There's quite a few job posings for bilingual Japanese/English electrical engineers. I was going to take elementry Japanese with the hope of getting on of these jobs... I wonder if this device can be used to help pass me off, sort of an electronic crutch. It's no substitute for the real thing, I know, but I wonder if companies are willing to implememt technology if it achieves the same result. Bottom line, I'm off to the Community College...
>>Live and remember, Die and forget, unless you are an Expert System