Microsoft Patenting IM Translation?

theodp writes "The USPTO just published Microsoft's patent application for a Method and system for translating instant messages, in which the software giant demonstrates how an English-speaking sender can type 'Hi' in an IM and it will be translated to 'Hola' for a Spanish-speaking recipient."

Comments

Re:Prior art?

[Slack0ff]

i think it was phantasy star online on the dream cast that could tranlate from japanese to english and back. But im prone to be wrong.

Re:Prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more obvious prior art: Kopete (kde instant messenger) has a plug-in that already does this.

Prior Art

[bflong]

Kopete has a plugin for this already in CVS. I've been using it for the past few days. Kopete is really comming along nicely.

prior art

[krokodil]

Fire does that.

Prior Art?

[VValdo]

This patent was filed on December 28, 2001. Version 0.29.a of the fantastic GPL'd instant messenger Fire introduced "Automatic, inline foreign language translation" on December 12, 2001.

I would also imagine that the feature was in CVS and publically downloadable before that.

W

Re:Is there prior art?

[kcm]

Proxide is at least one of the software projects out there that have this explicit, native capability.

Language translation filters were written for it more than a year ago, at least.

Prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

At just a quick glance, I'm not sure how this patent would ever hold up, considering I've seen similar technologies previously deployed.

I had a friend who worked for Amikai (http://www.amikai.com/), and at one point I was in a chat room with folks from Japan and Germany all using the SYSTRAN engine to translate our chat text in real time. They used to sell the system to companies interested in doing multinational online technical support without having a multilingual staff....

Let's see a model!

[Helpadingoatemybaby]

In the old days, up until 1870, the patent office required models to accompany a patent application.

1836 -- The Patent Act of July 4, 1836 reestablished the examination system of 1790. Models were once again required by the Commissioner. "The model, not more than 12 inches square, should be neatly made, the name of the inventor should be printed or engraved upon, or affixed to it, in a durable manner."

It was left to the commissioner of patents on whether or not he wanted to request a model. This case absolutely screams to the model requirement. In my opinion, for technology patents certainly, a person should not be able to patent something that they have no model for.

Microsoft is probably the least able to produce this product. Translation software? Show us that you have this technology. (Yeah right.) You want to translate on the fly on text filled with abbreviations and slang?

Okay, show us that you can do this. Show us your model (AND make it no more than 12 inches square!). Given their record breaking incompetence, there is no way in God's green acres that Microsoft has this technology workable or will have it in the near future.

Maybe a commissioner of patents write in campaign would fix all of these software problems up?

Re:1337?

[katsushiro]

Let me help you out here: Normal to 733t5p34k translator.

FBI needs training to learn IM

[angle_slam]

Sort of off-topic, but a lot of joke posts here are saying how difficult it is to translate IM. How difficult is it? The Washington Post had an article describing how FBI agents trying to catch pedophiles are being trained by 13 year old girls to learn how to use IM to act like a teenage girl. Some quotes:

As undercover assignments go, posing as a teenage girl online to catch pedophiles has its share of challenges for the typical FBI agent. Should he ever capitalize words in instant messages? Is it okay to say you buy your clothes at 5-7-9? And what about Justin Timberlake? Is he still hot or is he so two years ago?

[snip]

Most of their classmates did not know about their FBI work until yesterday, when Bald commended them on their achievements. Thanks to the girls, Bald said, the FBI has gathered such valuable information as: never begin a chat with "hello"; never use proper grammar in instant messages; and "pos" stands for "parent over shoulder."

If adult humans need to learn how to speak IM, how can a computer?

Re:Prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Phantasy Star Online had a system for translating between English and Japanese, but it only worked when you used the conversation builder (I forget what they called it), in which you constructed sentences by selecting topics and options from a list. As far as I can recall, there was no system to directly translate typed text.

Been available for Mac OS X for over an year

[pedroziviani]

I've been using for a few years a fantastic multi-protocol IM client for Mac OS X called Fire.

It has had automatic translation capabilities in several languages for well over an year, and it works very well. Further more, Fire also supports AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, IRC protocols.

There is still prior art to this.

[PenguiN42]

I recall seeing a demonstration of such a system a year ago by a research group at MITRE Corporation that used exactly this kind of idea -- sending the message off to a translation server.

Re:-1 clueless

[Greyfox]

The "innovation" seems to be in the maintaining the preferences and doing it automatically. The splitfire IRC script has had a macro that lets you request a translation in the language of your choice off babelfish for a very long time now.

IBM was demonstrating this 3 or 4 years ago

[scottme]

They have/had a product, Lotus Translation Services for Sametime, that plugs into their Sametime IM system and does translation by interfacing to some separate tranlsation server, such as their own WebSphere Translation product. They even have a demo of it on the web.

There may be detail differences in the implementation that the Microsoft patent application describes, but in general this is nothing new.

Re:A couple thoughts

[eliasen]

I did this a long time ago as a learning experience. My Universal Translator applet translates between several languages.

My favorite example was my friend Brian entering "Yo quiero un burrito" and the translation came out "I love a young donkey." Perfectly legitimate translation, too.

This will never work for translating instant messages until people learn to spell correctly, though.

Write the Patent Office

[BanjoBob]

Everybody with evidence of prior art, regardless of what country its in, should send the patent office a note pointing to the prior art. Just be nice with your language if you want to make an impact! Commissioner for Patents P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, VA 22313-1450 Reference: U.S. Patent Application 20030125927 At least, it will let them know they're being watched and maybe get them to scratch their heads a bit. Lots of dander there you know :)

MITRE's simple instant messaging

[luc_sky]

But it's alredy licensed by the MITRE corp. :-) http://www.mitre.org/news/releases/02/transclick08 _14_02.html, it's called Translingual Instant Messaging (TrIM).

Already been done

[solprovider]

IBM's Lotus SameTime has been able to do this for years. I saw a working demonstration of it in 1999.

Since it is IBM, I am certain that every aspect is already patented. The MS patent may have been missed, because it is the absolutle worst possible method for doing translations. (Yeah, I read the "article"/patent application.)

The differentiating point:
the message is translated prior to delivery

I believe SameTime does the translation in the server. The advantage is that the dictionaries can be updated frequently, and the processing happens on a machine that can handle it. The disadvantage is that you must have a server, so this will not work with true P2P chat clients.

For P2P chat clients, the best scenario is to have the receiver translate the message. Why should the sender's PC do the work? The receiver can translate according to the receiver's dictionary, which can be changed by the receiver. So if you are in IT, "server" is translated to "central computer", and if you are in the food industry, "server" is translated to "waiter/waitress". (I love reading Google-translated technical documentation about installing software on waiters.) The receiver can also set abbreviations, so "computer", "server", and "desktop" all translate to "PC".

If having the receiver do the translation has not been patented, this post is prior art and is released into the public domain. Just to be certain it is legal, here is the abstract:

A method and system translating instant messages between users who communicate in different languages is presented. Two or more users engaged in an instant messaging session compose messages according to a source language or destination language. The source language corresponds to the preferred language of the user of the device that sends messages during the session, while the destination language corresponds to the preferred language of the user of a device that receives sent messages. During the session, devices send source language information with each message. A content translation module implemented as a computer-executable module (e.g., DLL, exe, so) utilizes the information contained in the user profile to translate messages from the source language to the destination language. The received message is translated before the message is displayed. Because the message is translated after delivery, the destination device translates the message according to its local dictionary.

Diplomat

[samx]

An IRC client called Diplomat has done this at least since 1998. Looks like the site is gone now, but can still be found using the way back machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.universe.c om