Tokyo Narita Airport Gets PDA Voice Translators

commanderfoxtrot writes "According to the BBC, Narita airport can hire out PDAs capable of translating 50,000 Japanese and 25,000 English spoken words. This is all part of the e-Airport scheme at Narita: The speech-to-speech technology was developed by NEC, tested in Papero robots and then put in PDAs. ... Papero (Partner-Type Personal Robot), is the first robot to translate verbally between two languages in colloquial tongue."

Comments

Pervasiveness of English

[addie]

English is all over the world, and other languages are fast losing ground (Chinese of course is ahead of even English). This means that many languages will very likely die out within the next 50 to 100 years. I can think of a number of First Nations languages that are barely spoken anymore. This kind of technology is exactly what is needed to stop this trend. If we can effectively communicate using auto-translators, then the need for (as an example) South Korean children to learn English (at the expense of other education) will be drastically reduced. Sure it's expensive now and only works with a few languages, but it's early in the technology.

In downtown Montreal I hear about 5 different languages going to the grocery store and back. That's not at all unusual. I'd be very happy if it stayed that way, because it's a helluva lot more interesting than the alternative...

Re:Pervasiveness of English

[Cowboy Bebop]

Languages are born as quickly as they die, my friend. They're predicting that Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and English will be the big three 100+ years from now. I'd love to know what English will sound like after 100 years of evolution. It's changed so much in the past 50 that you can see the differences clearly.

If you like languages, please check out these websites. If you're bored, check them out too... you might learn that you are interested in something new!

http://www.ancientscripts.com/
http://www.omniglot.com
http://www.langmaker.com/

Re:Pervasiveness of English

[pubjames]

Unfortunately most people who speak English as their mother tongue do not speak another language (by which I mean Brits, North Americans, Australians...)

This means that they tend to have very funny ideas about languages, and a distorted perspective on language issues. When you say "English is all over the world, and other languages are fast losing ground", what you mean to say is that many people use English as the "lingua franca". However, this does not mean that all those people are stopping using their mother tongues.

So you're not going to find all those Spanish, French, Chinese or whatever speakers suddenly stopping using their own languages and speaking exclusively in English. As far as I am aware, that isn't happening anywhere in the world.

So, if you want to make generalisations about English being many people's second language and being the new lingua franca, then fine, I agree with you. However, if you are trying to argue that other languages are dying out because of English, I would suggest you learn another language and hang out with native speakers of that language. Then you'll have a better perspective about language issues.

Learn the language, if you can

[aelfric35]

While I am naturally in favor of anything that promotes communication between human beings, I hope that advances like this won't stop people from learning other languages. For me, living in a foreign country and being compelled by necessity to learn the local language was the most profoundly educational experience of my life. Learning another language forces one to learn how other people think, how their cultural worldview differs from one's own. It offers perspective that can't be gained in any other way.

That said, to learn _every_ language is too much to ask. If the technology takes off, and airports, etc., start implementing it, these PDAs could become indispensible tools for travelers of all kinds.

I'd call this a new low, but the robot would hear

[ianscot]

What a freakin' article. This has got to be a low in sloppy technology journalism. It's also deeply ironic that the story itself seems to have been badly translated. I mean:

Papero is the first all-hearing, all-seeing robot to be able to talk in conversational colloquialisms.

All-seeing?? "Papero" is omniscient?!?

We have this 2-to-1 ratio of Japanese to English colloquial words, which immediately made me curious about why the japanese vocabulary would need to be twice as big... Nope, our reporter(s) don't seem to have been curious about that.

There are subtitles on the story -- "Lend me your brain?" and "Local challenges" -- that seem to have little to do with the text under them.

Neither our /. blurb nor the BBC article give examples of it working. You'd think they'd at least give us an example of sentences put in and out. Ask it where the bathroom is, and have your japanese-speaking reporter judge the results, at the very least.

On the other hand...

[philv2]

One could argue the other side of the coin and say that if we end up speaking less languages, we'll lose that much more of our intellectual prowess. Speaking different languages is definitely a good brain excerciser and provides the speaker with a different perspective on the world, events, etc, than other languages. Providing of course, that the speaker is (for example), thinking in french rather than translating word per word from his native tongue.

Different languages isn't something i'd like to see vanish either, they're definitely a rich part of our cultures. With translators like the above, once perfected, will allow us to communicate perfectly with each other and permit us to keep a significant portion of our cultures intact. Living in Quebec, god knows I've heard a lot about that!