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

Take it to a Pentecostal meeting.

[marko123]

Then again, you need to understand Holyspiritish before you can write the translator.

Next step -- sign language?

[blackcoot]

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 ;-)

technical link

[madenosine]

if you arent satisfied with the pc magazine summary, you can read this

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

Long way to go

[puto]

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.

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.

already available in handheld units

[js7a]

A St. Petersburg, Russia company called Ectaco has been selling bidirectional handheld speech recognition-based translation systems called Universal Translators.

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.

I hear it can also do Hungarian

[Copperhead]

Here are some sound clips...

"I am looking for the tobacconist."

"I need some matches."

"How much do I own you?"

The entire dictionary can be found here.

Even worse yet

[Bastian]

How are we /ever/ going to get it into a package that is small enough it fit in your ear and watertight enough to let swim around in a bowl of water when you're not using it?

Re:Brute Force

[forgoil]

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.