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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."
I recall Ultima Online or some other MMPORG having translation capability while chatting.
I know we like to challenge all these Amazon patents that come down the pipe citing tons of prior art and how ridiculous the patent sounds...
This patent sounds like a strategic business move though and something that nobody else is doing...
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Free your mind.
Now we get to see how badly automatic translation can be butchered. Seriously though -- it's nice to see someone trying to bridge language gaps like this. Maybe this will create a demand for higher quality automatic translation.
I wonder if ;) will get translated as "bite me".
Or what about the one sticking your tongue out? Isn't that VERY offensive in some cultures? Great...we're going to start WWIII because of this.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I have a script that runs incoming messages via Babelfish, by using the domain address as the translation source language/country. Am I now breaking Microsoft's patent?
IANAL. IAN American. And my employer strongly believes in patent protection for IP of any kind, including software, but this strikes me as being an example of totally the wrong kind of patent ever to be issued anywhere, under any circumstances to any organization. Doubly so to MSFT.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
How are they going to translate all those mispelled words, Oh and those annoying shortening of words because people are too lazy to spell out the 4,5,6 letter word.
From the site:
English : "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak"
Tranlator - English -> Russian
Russian : "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten"
Automatic translation is a classic AI problem. Shouldn't there have to be a "working" prototype prior to issueing the patent??
At a prior job a few years back, I helped to implement, and then immediately UN-implement, an automatic translation feature for multinetwork chat rooms. It's not so much that the translations were bad (they were), as the fact that the only users who tolerated the poor translations were the ones with SO LITTLE to say that chat rooms using it were quickly dominated by only the most inane of conversations.
It takes an english sentance, translates it, back and forth a random number of times, between other random languages.
If you have AOL instant messenger. AIM "JavaAIMBot" this message:
babel Hi, Ivan, that vaccuum cleaner you left is on the fritz again, it doesn't suck
Some Sample Runs:
hello, it is not Ivan, this agent of pulizia of the vaccuum, than it still leaves it, in the Fritz, the inala
hello, not Ivan, that it has sucked means of this vaccuum of pulizia, like it is it you, in the Fritz other an hour, it on the left
hello, Ivan, this pulitore that the vaccuum you, to that it has left is not always in Fritz, he aspires
While you're there... type help to see what else it can do.
If you're interested: Its an open source project:
SF Page
Home Page
Source to this babel fish module
Scott
Back in the ICQ days someone msg'd me from french canada. I translated their speech using babelfish and my own back into french. I can belive this patent was granted, but, christ. It's blindingly obvious how to do it. The only problem is that there is no easily available 'translation libraries' to plug use that actualy work. Hrm, perhaps a good target for open source developers :)
That said, there is some prior art in William Gibson's Iduro where a conversation is translated back and forth between english and japanese. Sure, it was as audio, but really what's the diff?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No patent describes its claims as "the" widget that does x. All claims are described as "a" widget that does x. It's standard language. If "a" wasn't all-encompassing then patents would be worthless. It's understood that, during the monopoly period, it will be "the" only one. If you make "a" real-time instant messanger translator, they'll sue you.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
in 1997 we had a company that had a multiplayer
game with chat, and we could set it to run messages
through babelfish on the server (or whatever AltaVista's translation service was).
We even did translation twice for some games, The idea was to simulate international business negotiation, so to make the communication harder, we'd have messages translated from english to german to english, to simulate a scenario where a merger between an english and german company had taken place.
Ayttm does this already...does the patent office not know about Google?
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As a Unix SysAdmin I used to look after a spanish guy who's english wasn't that good and who requested a little help with translating english type commands into his native language.
.cshrc file to provide some crude translation for him. Whilst it's not as classy sounding as the spin good old MS put on it, it did provide instant translation of spanish into english. Could this be construed as "prior art".
As he was using the "csh" environment I suggested to him that he could use a series of aliases in his
The "content" in this case would be the unix command set and the "computer executable module" would be the "C" shell.
Language translation is NOT a new idea.
Yours toungue-in-cheekily
Hal