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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.
Looks like a fascinating project --- I wonder if their Vision and Robotics boys are working on recognizing sign language which, for all intents and purposes, seems to be a very much more difficult problem (don't believe me --- see how well the facial recognition packages do in production environments :-P). I wonder if this is at the stage where it could be attached to a something like a virtual {insert sign language of your choice here} "translator"... hrm, sounds like a summer project ;-)
It always amazed me that the Star Trek univeral translators could translate a half completed sentence to the same meaning in all languages, even though each language would certainly arrange sentence structures very differently.
So long as this stuff stays on the recieving end, this is all a step in the right direction. You don't want to deprive the people you're sending information to of any information. Let them decide whether to use a human or a computer. Sending a computer based translation that you can't understand only increases the chance of offending someone/misrepresenting something.
Giving it to soldiers in the field so they can "speak" the foreign language is bad. Instead give one-way devices to both sides and let them use those to translate what's told to them. That way if they need a human translator to clarify that's still an option.
It would be terrible if information started flowing between countries that had been passed through a computer translator first. Please, let me use babelfish to translate that spanish document, don't use it for me (heck, I have friends from south america who can help me clarify it if I need to but that's *no good* without the original spanish)...
Translation through tounges is a lossy process. Not translating it at least prevents compromising the information. It's all still there...just a wee bit harder to get at.
Brian
I'm majoring in computer linguistics, and currently we're examining different computer translation models; the one you're suggesting is called the interlingua approach.
The idea is, basically, that you need an "in-betweener" language that can carry all the meaning and connotations of both source and target language. Then you only need translations rules for both sets and then let it run.
The main drawback is that you always have some loss in both translation steps, which sometimes adds up to quite a difference in meaning. The main advantage is that you can modularize - once you have a working English-to-Interlingua module, you can use Interlingua-to-French, Interlingua-to-German, what have you. For further information, google for interlingua "machine translation"...
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
And how about words that doesn't even exist in the target language? How about three of them in the same sentence? Would you like to insert a few sentences of explaination, including a few paragraphs of cultural references?
The only translation softwares that I have seen has either been very faulty (babelfish) or very simple (ordering tickets). Every time I have spoken with a linguist they have given me reason after reason why it would be very hard, if not impossible, to translate from very different languages (English->Swedish is probably possible, even though you would sound like a complete moron after a while, but Japanese->English would be much harder).
I think that the science and research is important, but I will retain a healthy sceptisism towards any "perfect" systems popping up anytime soon.
Languages have very precise definitions, and it is possible to make programs that translate any language into logic, see aristotle for an example.
No, languages do not have very precise definitions. Take this from a published translator: they do not. The definitions in the dictionary are at best approximations to a particular range of any given word's semantic field; precision with human languages is impossible. Read up on some linguistics before you start posting things about linguistics.