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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."
I'll be interested to see how this pans out. Its not neccisary to stress the differences between asian languages in general and english, obviously. Best of luck to them. After 4 months in asia, I'm curious to see what the Japanese version of decent english produced from a PDA would sound/look like. it'll be quite the accomplishment if they can make this work well. Engrish is never pretty for anyone. (see http://www.engrish.com for further details);)
this paired with the sleek technology/wifi lounge set up they have should produce a higher standard for international airports. cheers!
Sounds like a lot of work has gone into this just to get it to work between just two specific languages.
While the ability to speak in the colloquial language is useful, I would imagine a robot that could speak in MANY languages, with lower accuracy, would be more useful.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
You anticipated my thought: a conversation-translating PDA is another step towards a protocol droid.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
I travel on business quite a bit. Last year I was outside of the US more than I was in it. I was in Yokosuka Japan and Naples Italy for more than half the year. I tried to learn enough of each language to be polite, but the truth is that I will be in Greece, Japan, and Singapore this year and I do not have time to keep refreshing myself on the languages. One of my biggest concerns, when I travel, are the local customs and laws. I have to admit that if this works, I mean works well, it may take some of the stress of traveling abroad for those who go to many different countries. I need a PDA that tells me the local customs and helps me with the language.
English is all over the world, and other languages are fast losing ground (Chinese of course is ahead of even English).
What do you mean losing ground? World languages (aka French, Spanish, and English mainly), rarely serve as nothing more than a second language to non-native speakers. The very reason you hear 5 different languages going to the grocier store is proof in itself - people may very well learn second languages, but by nature you revert to your native tounge as soon as you can.
I can think of a number of First Nations languages that are barely spoken anymore
Such as?
This is a quote from the article (Engrish!):
"Most certainly, it is absolutely ideal and it is most likely this technology will be utilised," - Chris Shimizu, NEC's corporate relations manager.
Yeah, and? There's nothing grammatically wrong with that statement; it's better English than I hear most Americans use. Yeah, he used the words "most" and "it is" twice in one sentence, but that's really the only nitpick - he used them in grammatically correct ways. Just because it sounds strange to you doesn't mean it's incorrect, and it doesn't make it "Engrish" either.
I clicked on the link to this thread because I've used Narita Airport several times and thought it was odd that they'd start using these translators when all Narita customer service employees already speak at least practical English (it's a requirement for the job). I'm a little surprised at the undercurrent of racism going through a lot of the replies here so far. I've looked and laughed at the Engrish.com site myself in the past (as has my wife, who is Japanese, and many of our friends) - I'm not saying we all need to be PC here. There's a time and proper context for that kind of thing.
But when you see a new translator hit the market, why would your first thought be to make fun of the people it's trying to help? It's just juvenile.
Anyway, I think Narita is sort of a strange place to test market these translators only because Narita is already one of the most bilingual places in all of Japan. Being there is similar to being at San Francisco International. All signs are in English, all ticket agents and other reps speak English (usually perfect English), even prices on goods are often listed in both yen and dollars. I just don't see how translators are particularly necessary at Narita; they could be put to better use at various locations inside Tokyo itself.
I tried the e-navi in mid-February - I picked it up at Narita.
You have to apply in advance and they only have a limited number. Once you receive the device you can take it with you anywhere in Japan - you are supposed to give it back before you leave. I got bored with it so I dropped it off at the airport when I was there to pick up some friends.
I speak Japanese and English so it wasn't useful to me other than as a geek toy but I played with it for about 7 days so I really got the hang of it.
The device does use very conversational and very clear sounding Japanese and English. If you are a tourist this will be a very useful device.
Biggest issue I saw with it was social - Japanese people that don't know you see you coming at them with a weird looking PDA they tend to walk rapidly in the other direction. A couple of times I had to explain in Japanese first what the device did and then people saw how useful it could be.
The only other issue I had was that it couldn't understand my speech in English when I had a cold and was wearing a mask. Japanese was no problems (English is my native language). If I took the mask off and spoke clearly it had no problems.
You can also use the device as a cell phone for outgoing Japan calls only and it has other cool features like email and a browser.
The most impressive thing is the full speed speech recognition. It was 80-90% accurate for me in English and about 95% accurate for Japanese.
actually he is very right, the problem is most "new" languages are so simular to other lannguages that its hard to tell them apart, they are more dialects not entirely new languages... But if you look at how few languages have actuallly "died" there are just that, VERY very few. The idea is that to a lot of peopse a evolving language is the death of it, with the birth being the evolved version... I mean just go to england if your a american.... you cant figure out half of what they say and you SPEAK their language... same with the french and french canadians...
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So what are the downsides to everyone speaking English (or Chinese for that matter)? Aside from the people who are ticked that nobody wants to speak in their language anymore.
Is there any possibility of REAL issues such as exist in our Software monoculture today?
I mean, if English dominated the lingual landscape, then it would make it harder for me to filter out all the spam I keep getting (about 1/3 is currently in Spanish now)
Narita is a perfect place to test market these things because if they don't work, people can fall back on their own language skills, instead of being totally fucked. By the same token, another perfect place to test them is some place where people don't have overlapping language skills, because it will get more of a workout. It's just perfect in a different way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"