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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 ;-)
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.