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Navy Unveils Polyglot Chat For Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "According to ScienceBlog, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, trying to keep friendly armies in Iraq from accidentally blowing each other to smithereens, is helping create software that connects instant messaging (IM) with machine translation (MT). The result: Chat software to be used in Iraq that automatically translates your messages into the correct language of the reader, called the the Coalition Chat Line - it's 'getting rave reviews from U.S. and allied-coalition personnel.'"
Given the quirks of babelfish and similar, I hope poor, mangled machine translations don't cause more negative incidents than they prevent.
They released it to others... preferably open source, so that one might be able to better understand a friend far away.
That is intended to help peace in such regions? Wonder what amount of casualties could start simple phrases like "greetings to your mother". At least if its read in english you know what it tried to say, but if the original meaning is lost with translations that had some non-diplomatic implications, well, the risk is high.
The article starts with a question:
So how do you get soldiers and commanders speaking different languages in a theater of war to communicate effectively and not, for example, blow each other up mistakenly?
I think there is a simple answer to that question - use human translators! I would never trust a machine translation with my life.
I speak a second language to reasonably high standard, and so I realise that languages can be really subtle things. Sometimes things just don't translate directly, and they need interpretation e.g.
Non-English speaking soldier How's the new weapon system working?
US soldier It's hot! Damn hot!
Non-English speaking soldier Oh dear! It shouldn't be hot! You must stop using it immediately!
US soldier No I mean it rocks!
Non-English speaking soldier It's fastenings are insecure? Sounds like we should send an engineer immediately! Please cease using it!
Language technology...is better than you may think.
I expect it is actually a lot worse than most people think. Yes, in specialised areas where you can use lookup tables it can work pretty well. But that's hardly suprising is it?
For general texts it sucks bigtime.
Most people in the world speak english. Is not hard to learn and use. So, maybe this machine is outdated... ...I think most spanish at Iraq will also use english to speak to USA and UK people. I am wrong? So this machine is not too much usefull... most educated people ALREADY can communicate each other. English is actually the latin lang of our time.
-Woof woof woof!
How can you think Esperanto is a neutral language?! It is compose solely of romanctic languages! I just watched Incubus(the only movie made in Esperanto and it has William Shattner) and you can pretty much undestand it if you know english and some french/italian/spanish(choose one) now for someone who doesn't speak a romantic language learning this is not going to be easy. Also forcing a culture to learn your language is not the way to make friends.
Esperanto can be taught in just a month or two
Really? To anyone? I suspect that non-Western language speakers, like virtually anyone in Asia, might disagree. As well as those with rather esoteric languages like Hungarian.
And as for those who speak languages that are similar to Esperanto (namely any Germanic or Romantic derived language) could learn any given langugage "in just a month or two, to a level allowing excellent communications".
doesn't help face to face
Which is why we have personal translators for that situation, which do exist and do work. You can even get them for civilian use.
Esperanto was dead before it was even born. It doesn't evolve with any civilization and so lacks terminology that comes into usage over time. And, heck, if we want to pick a popular "neutral" language, then Klingon beats Esperanto for number of speakers. Yes. It is that silly.
I sure hope the military's got better machine translation than the rest of us do.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Oh yes. The "imminent threat" that meant that we had to go to war ASAP was that he'd had WMD 15 years ago.
Well, since in the last 10 years only 4 Canadians have died as a result of direct military combat, all 4 of them the result of US Friendly fire, will it translate Canadian to American as well? Oh wait, I guess we all speak English.. So much for that..
Mod +5 Drunk
Joke as you will, but we shot down more British soldiers due to stupid screw ups than were shot by Iraqis. Maybe instead of translators, we should be writing control systems for our automated missile defense systems that don't suck, and putting someone a little more responsible and trained than 18 year old dropouts at the controls. In at least one incident, it was because Patriot missile batteries kept identifying helicopters and planes as inbound missiles. If the operator doesn't stop it after about 10 seconds, the battery fires a missile by itself. Two harriers and at least one helicopter(I believe it had close to 30 British troops on board) were shot down that way. Nobody survived.
It's pretty fucking embarrassing that our troops and their computer systems can't tell the difference between a helicopter and a missile traveling at nearly the speed of sound, and that a system which was routinely proven to have unacceptable friendly-fire targeting problems was deployed so heavily(and when problems surfaced as expected, to meet a threat that didn't exist, the systems were not shut off). As always, technology is being hauled in to solve a problem other technology and sheer incompetence created.
Please help metamoderate.
we think in memes.
We happen to use words to express the memes but we don't think in words.
Regardless, its the old: "I know you think you understand what you heard but I don't believe that you understand that what I said was not what I meant."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If that were true it might actually be easier to learn, at least for those speaking any language of European origin. In fact, there is a lot of Germanic and Slavic in there as well, but most of it is so unpredictably distorted it's hard to recognize. In addition, many frequent words as well as the grammatical structure are entirely contrived and bear no relation to any natural language.
For a more naturalistic language that's actually easier to understand as well as learn for those knowing English and/or any Romance language, try Interlingua.
Anyone in the world who wants to mean something on an international level is currently forced to learn US English. It doesn't seem to disadvantage the US much. In fact it puts it at a significant advantage because native speakers are often preferred.
Aber naturlich ist es selten von Nachteil, mehr als nur einer Sprache maechtig zu sein. --> babelfish --> But it is rare naturally from disadvantage to be powerful more than only one language. --> babelfish --> Aber es ist selten natuerlich vom Nachteil, bedeutende mehr als nur eine Sprache zu sein.
See?
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Well, then. Why don't you sign up?
Oh, that's right. You don't want to earn a whopping $20k a year, living in a beautifully redecorated foxhole, eating gourmet "Meals-Rejected-by-Ethiopians", while the "competition" takes pot-shots at your ass.
Sorry pal, but until "intelligent" people like yourself start signing up, we're stuck with dumb-ass drop-outs like me manning the guns.
--- This