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Speaking in Tongues
Desert1 writes "Carnegie Mellon's renowned computer science department has developed a system which allows for conversation between two different languages called Tongues. Currently this has been used between Croatian and English, perhaps one day they will be able to develop one that will allow politicians to talk to normal folks and be understood." It's been in development for a while.
if you arent satisfied with the pc magazine summary, you can read this
I have a fish in my ear.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I dunno if computer translation is going to be up to par for a long time.
I speak both Spanish and English. English is native and Spanish is due to 3 years in South America. And my grandparents are from Spain. I did not really know anything until I lived in Colombia and my granny who has Phd in her own language was a pretty harsh mistress. I was 21 years old when I learned. Of course living with a Colombian sysadmin girl for two years was a big help. She liked the Penguin.
Languages differ too much from location to location. Justlike English in regions in the US. I am from New Orleans and the english changes from neighborhood to neoghborhood.
Word meanings and expressions might be exactly the same in spelling and sound but mean different things to different people.
To build these variables into software would be a *HUGE* task.
I think the best we could hope for is software that does a decent brute translation and then a human does the final edit.
The problem is one word might be ok to use in Puerto Rico(well they are confused about which language they speak) but socially unacceptable in Colombia. Software cannot know the difference.
People will always do the translation gig better.
Puto
Course my handle is pretty bad in any Latin country.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
They have them in English-Russian and English-German at present, but apparently plan to add more languages all the time. Their unidirectional models ("UT-103") handle about eight languages currently.
This has been done already I believe, at least to a limited extent, and with excellent accuracy. One of my Professors at GaTech, Thad Starner, was involved in a project for this and iirc the project worked with a better than 90+% accuracy.
U TF -8&q=Thad+Starner+Sign+Language
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=
I volunteered for the past year full-time in the central office of World Esperanto Association (an internationally recognized NGO in official relations with the UN and UNESCO), and in such a place you can easily see that Esperanto is very much alive and in use. Working in its youth department, my job involved travelling quite a bit, going to various Esperanto events throughout the U.S. and Europe, and it's clear that many young people are learning it, keeping its population of speakers fresh.
As far as the Tongues project goes, I know a U.S. army chaplain who was picked to test the technology (the first people to use this will be the U.S. Army, especially chaplains and medics), and he said it's pretty rusty, but shows promise. Maybe a middle step in Esperanto would improve such a project, though.