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.

Comments

Esperanto...

[Average]

In the pre-computer days, some folks noticed that a neophyte (basic idea, needs dictionary)translation into Esperanto was much more comprehended at the other end than a neophyte translation to the destination language or a neophyte translation by the recipient.

The reasoning was that the process of translating into a more formal mechanical language clarified and codified ideas.

Once again, it's the dividing line between human and machine that's the problem. Millions of people train themselves to C or the shells. Fewer to assembly. But it takes some wetware work to push the human/computer boundary closer to the computer.

Like most programming has a learning curve, usually less than ASM, leaving language translation completely to the machine will be fraught and ambiguous. Good translation requires some push from normal speech, but maybe not so far as mastering every other possible language...

Not quite real translation...

[Theaetetus]

The team built the system's translator using a technique known as example-based machine translation. Essentially, they created a database that holds a massive list of English phrases and their Croatian equivalents, culling data from bilingual Internet sites and university textbooks. When the engine receives a text phrase in one language, it provides the equivalent text in the other.

So, basically, it's a lookup function, translating the incomming speech and then comparing in a database... So, while they could have a huge dictionary that could cover most situations, they aren't really doing a 'translation' per say...
Although, then again, for anyone who has taken language classes, but are not fluent in the second language, isn't that what we do? I know that while I was taking French and Latin, to come up with phrases I would do phrase translations because I was still thinking in English. I wasn't fluent enough to think in those other languages, so I couldn't formulate phrases directly properly.

I suppose, in essence, this will work as a translator, but it is neither a babel-fish type universal translator nor is it any replacement for fluency.

Still cool, though. Now, can they get it to run on a Palm?

-T

Re:Long way to go

[achurch]

People will always do the translation gig better.

Oh, absolutely. I'm bilingual as well (Japanese and English), and particularly with Japanese, the language itself is so ambiguous that even native speakers don't always understand each other--you can imagine how difficult that made it to learn the language. ;)

But I don't think the point of machine translation is necessarily to get a perfect translation out; for that, the machine would have to be able to think like a human, and that would bring up all sorts of difficulties I don't even want to touch. But if the computer can do a good-enough translation, then the humans involved can figure out the rest. For example, another poster suggested the ambiguity of "bank"--a place where you store money vs. the edge of a river--but even if the machine translation got it wrong, the humans involved could figure things out in the end. (You could say "the edge of the river" instead, for example.)

I'm personally looking forward to progress in machine translation. While there will never be any substitute for actually learning and understanding a foreign language, realtime translation could go a long way toward improving intercultural understanding, and could help stem the loss of languages due to the spread of English and other "core" languages.