Slashdot Mirror
Can Your Mouth Become Multilingual?
Roland Piquepaille writes "During a videoconference last week between Karlsruhe, Germany, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA, the talk of Alex Waibel, from CMU, was automatically translated in German and Spanish. Both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PPG) and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (PTR) attended the conference, took pictures and were impressed by this new 'open domain' speech-to-speech translation. This new computer technology is based on artificial intelligence (AI) and statistical methods. During the demonstration, the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course."
Your mouth must know a few tricks to get so many stories approved.
This still doesn't solve the problem that automatic translators still have problems processing the logic of certain languages. Just look at babelfish.
Oh yeah. Please. Right now. Insert the electrodes into me right now. I can't wait!
Is it fascism yet?
...facial recognition?
No sig for now.
Don't believe a word of this. Everybody likes to say they've finally cracked the problem of machine translation. This is exactly what we saw previously on Slashdot with the quote about the "bin Laden tapes" or whatever.
Proof? Ah, we'll get to that later.
Where in any of the links does it give the text of what he said, and the translation? And the analysis to the success of the translation? I found two sentences it mentioned. That's not good enough. Let's allow independent examination of the success of this translation.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Bush and the computer will crash. Could be a good source for stuff to /dev/null though.
but backwards, something like this would be cool as hell though, even if translations are rough, it's a lot better than nothing at all. International travel would be awesome with this. I don't like the bit about "implantation" though /tinfoil hat
constant maintence would be needed to maintain a good database for this translator, or else the 70s slangs would be coming out of the other guys mouth. it would be much easier to LEARN a language at a young age, then you dont have to worry about "are they understanding what im saying right now?" when you use one of those high-tech translators :D
I'll bet that the people behind the patriot act will thank you for these implants.
In terms of the hardware... " NASA scientists have begun to computerize human, silent reading using nerve signals in the throat that control speech." Subvocal speech reading systems offer the added bonus of now having to listen to the mundane trivia being broadcast from the cubicle next to yours.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Can it translate leet?
So I won't even have to use a phone to get my speech intercepted, The Bad Guys [tm] now can directly wiretap my mouth. Perhaps this can be intercepted by chewing on my tinfoil hat?
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
has went on too long already without one mention of Universal Translators.. I hereby revoke all Slashdotter's Geek Cards.
Computers have a hard time translating written things as it is... any bilingual will tell you that online translators for complete sentences will do nobody any good, for the most part. My Spanish teachers are all able to see papers with computer translations very easily, due to similarities in words and meanings (such as the word "pants" which can be colthing or breathing heavily) Not to mention, grammar and things like that are not done well at all. For the fun of it, try going to an Online translator and write something in English, translate it to Spanish, then back to English. Some results are pretty crazy. I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: what makes the translators so special compared to the ones we have now? How can they work better? Sure, there is probably a bit more effort put into these, but I don't think that a good translator will be available for another 5 years, not to mention the whole "take the speech you aren't saying" thing is hard to believe.
When I smash my thumb accidentally with a hammer, for a few seconds I can swear I am multilingual.
Table-ized A.I.
Getting closer ... now did WW3 start yet and will 2063 be the start of lightspeed travel? Can't wait, but logic says I must. \\-//_/ Live Long And Prosper
Klingon for the masses!
Table-ized A.I.
You've mistaken intelligent design for a scientific theory.
Who ordered that?
Is anyone else concerned about the trade off between learning something through hard work versus having technology in the future substitute it? I have learnt 4 languages through college, self-study and cultural immersion. It'll kinda peeve me off that people can just learn it straight away as if learning is some form of flippant fad. Is anyone else concerned about a future where anyone and everyone could possibly download the worlds knowledge into our heads? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the world to be educated, it's just I think that some people may take it for granted.
Another approach is from some work I saw demoed at an MIT conference in Vienna. If you capture enough video of a person speaking, you can remix/rerender video of that person saying anything you want them to say. The software works at the phonetic level so you can even synthesize words that the person has never even uttered before and even make them appear to speak languages that they don't know. They had some visually convincing video showing people saying things that the researchers claimed they never said. Yes, the demo version worked with clean test video and a professional video/image analyst could probably spot a faked/remized video. But if these technology becomes good enough, I can see it making video a nontrustworthy source of data (like skillfully retouched photos).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Since the computer is reading how your face is moving and what it is saying, couldn't a separate program digitially edit out these electrodes? Jaw moves down to say "ah" and the computer knows that it needs to shade over the electrode lower than it was doing before.
You know I always used to smuggly laugh at all the English speaking aliens.
I seriously doubt someone eventually couldn't figure out a way to do even the most outlandish of ideas. The human imagination never ceases to amaze.
Having said that..... Borg enhancements sound great but if you really think about it--- if you take that kind of efficiency to it's natural conclusion-- then there would be nothing left but electronic thingies that look kinda human.
Progress? Sheeesh.
Indeed, we may see a new form of slander arise.
Imagine what would happen if a malicious individual was able to modify such a system before a CEO gives a big speech to investors. The CEO is speaking English, but the Romanian and Chinese investors are listening in their native tongues.
Soon enough the CEO is talking about synergistically-tiered multi-integrated doodads, but the Romanians are hearing "Cock sucking whore bitch! I fucked her up the ass in Bucharest and her nipples bled!", while the Chinese investors are hearing a whole string of racial epithets. Who would be responsible if such an incident occurred?
Multiple nations also have hate crime legislation. Would the CEO now be responsible for committing a hate crime, merely because this device mistranslated what he said, and output racist remarks?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It is with extreme disgust that I write this letter and say <snip rest-of-extremely-long-diatriabe-against-Roland>
Why don't you just call him an idiot? That's an awful lot of effort to waste on someone you don't like. I don't think I wasted that much effort on Clinton when he was president. I think the only reason the slashdot editors post Roland's stories is to get a rise out of Roland anti-fans because I can see no other reason to post his stories. I agree that Roland is an idiot, but Roland is no Serdar Argic. He does not deserve the effort that is required to villify him.
What about, I hack your mouth and say dirty things to your manager...
..
..
..
..
..
... they are close to us .. the portscanners will get you!
or
Update failed; you now got a speech impertinence. Don't mind the gaping mouth...
or
Download your speeches now; for 1500$ you can have your own personalized speech to your press conference...
or
This technology has already been invented secretly by the government and are testing it on the monkey in the BUSHes there...
or
Mass broadcast virus of speech; everyone starts saying sexist things to eachother...
or
The Jim Carrey or Robin Williams SPEECH IMPERTINENCE PACK, NOW FOR SALE, ORDER NOW, 1-800-SPEECH
enough uses not ?
urf, they are out there man
Somebody is scanning your computer.
Your computer's TCP ports:
6588, 8000, 8080, and 3124 have been scanned from 66.35.250.150..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I am currently taking a great course on the Introduction of Linguistists. I have been exposed to the rather complex process a human being uses to make a sound (phoneme). You can go here to get a good idea of what it truly entails http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosop hy/24-900Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm
The main obstacles to this is the fact each langauge uses different places and manners of articulation as well as the fact that intonation can change the meaning of a word. In Mandarin the word ma can change meaning based on tone.
This is not a factor in English but certainly is for most Asian languages.
The ability to use phonemes is one thing but paralinguistics is another (sarcasm).
Obviously, no. IANAL, but most crimes are only crimes if you intentionally do whatever makes the crime (or try to, at least, but that already is something that must be specifically stated in the law, too).
Just as an example, suppose you go to a fleamarket or yard sale or so and buy something from someone. If it turns out later on that that person was actually an imposter who took the money from you when the real owner wasn't there, does that make you a thief? Of course not. You'll probably have to give back what you thought you bought (because in reality, no contract to buy it was made), and you'll be entitled to receive your money back from the imposter (same reason), but unless you knew that the imposter was not the real owner and went ahead, anyway, you didn't commit any crime.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Speech recognition software is getting slightly better all the time using the old wave-analysis method. By looking at a waveform it is generally quite easy to deduce the behaviour of each part of a vocal system - this is (very simply put) how modern mobile phones work, by constructing a physical model and reproducing the sound on the other side with software. Is there really any need to implant electrodes in peoples' throats in order to measure the vibration in their vocal tracts?
Moreover, is the result going to be any more accurate?
True, implanting things always means that you don't have to be next to a microphone. But you *do* need to be near the software, and the other person *does* need to be near a speaker.
I'm sure the software is very impressive, but the front-end looks like a pointless excuse to follow a cyberpunk dream.
If you're interested in reading the actual research paper involved (as opposed to a journalist's interpretation), it's readable here - pdf file, but lots of graphs, tables and pictures, so I'll forgive them.
Do you have anything better to do than to try to game the system for mod points? Apparently not. Please, for God's sake, get a life.
Actually, the idea that the flat Earth theory was widely accepted any time after the 1st century AD is a rather unfortunate myth.
I won't even get started on ID, because we'll be here all evening.
no seriously. i was watching the extra stuff on "appleseed", and they talked about motion capture for expressions and talking. unfortunately, the motion capture actors had to keep their heads still for the scenes, necessitating the need to re-dub the movie due to the stiff acting. i know, it's not as earth shattering as world politics, but i thought it was cool.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Take Debian -- Its users are spread out geographically about as even as something could get. You'd think that would be somehow conducive to developing this. What's the deal? I need something that handles more languages than google and babelfish.
Full article
Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it.
There is no modern day battleground of evolution against anything.
There is no theory of intelligent design. I suppose you could argue that there is a hypothesis of intelligent design.
The fundamental problem here is that "evolutionists" do NOT claim that evolution is a series of incremental changes. "Evolutionists" claim that evolution is a combination of a series of incremental changes alongside a series of radical mutations. These radical mutations generally result in the premature death of the creature, but can also give rise to the "irreducibly complex" of which you speak. Take for example the idea of bacteria which are resistant to certain anti-bacterial compound. The "incremental" development of resistance is ridiculous. Being slightly less dead from exposure to anti-bacterial compounds is not an inheritable trait so you cannot pass it on to your offspring. You can, however, encounter a mutation that gives resistance and then pass that mutation to offspring. Try reading up on evolution and natural selection a bit.
It's a bit like hazing, and while people on both sides of the issue become almost fanatical in defense of their sacred cow the end result is good science.
Sacred cows are Hindu. You are probably a christian. You might want to pick a different metaphor. There are no "sides" or "issues." There is fact and belief. If your beliefs are contrary to fact, then you are not on some "side," you are delusional.
But the overhead of trying to generate acceptance of a scientific breakthrough is almost as difficult as making the breakthrough to start with!
There is no need to generate acceptance of a scientific breakthrough. Science is science. The results of an experiment are fact. Whether people accept the results or not is immaterial. If you cool water to a temperature below 32 degrees fahrenheit at one atmosphere, the water will become a solid. If you choose not to "accept" that fact, you are free to, but that does not change the fact that the water is now a solid.
man, I feel like mold.
please somebody mod him down, enough and he'll be at -1 and never recover.
Good God, I could do with a cup of tea.
As mentioned in HHGTG, that is.
it's about speech recognition. They've identified a new source of data for identifying phonemes, one that apparently provides cleaner output than working from the audio. Dollars to donuts the resulting words are then just popped into a Babelfish-equivalent.
This is interesting and important work, but the translation angle is really just one potential application of the technology.
"We can see a new form of calumny occurring, as it happens, itself. Assume what would happen if a malicious individual could such a system modify before to CEO a large speech to investors gives. Ceo speak English, but the Rumanian and Chinese investors listen in their domestic tongen. Concerning multi-geïntegreerd synergistically-tiered speak CEO shortly enough doodads, but the Rumanians hear sucking whore of the cock female! I fucked her omhoog the rest its projections drawn off in boekarest and!, whereas the Chinese investors hear a whole tie of rassenepitheta. Who responsible would be if such an incident occurred? The multiple nations have also the legislation of the hatred crime. Ceo would commit now of of a hatred crime the cause to be, only because this apparatus found oneself translated what said racist observations he, and output?" Interesting.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
As soon as my girlfriend slips her tongue in my mouth, it becomes multi-tongued and French.
And then I wake up.
these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat
This calls to mind the "translator microbes" from Farscape. Maybe we'll eventually have something similar. Translator Nanites...
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." --Pericles
Hey,
...). Such a combination would be suitable both to deal with large amounts of data (statistical) and to deal with negation (only available in the symbolic appoach).
Alex Waibel was one of the leading scientists in the Verbmobil project in 1995. The technology was pretty interesting (maintaining probability "graphs" from the Markov speech analysis through the syntactic and semantic analysis).
However, results were pretty poor due to the structure of the project (just too many people) and because many institutions really weren't interested in the project and went for their favourite research topic with a new name (that's how research in Germany works...). Perfectly possible that Mr. Waibel advanced with the topic, now 10 years after the first major trial...
Personally, I actually gave up AI completely after the ESSLLI (European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information) and promised not to touch the subject again until there were a "unified" formalism incorporating the old "symbolic" approach (predicate logic etc.) and the new statistical methods (Bayes, Markov,
Maybe they've got it this time? It's a pitty they don't talk more about the underlying formalism.
Btw., the electrodes are probably just an enhancement of the normal speech recognition software to get a better "signal".
Bests,
Frank
http://www.project-open.com/
Well, no. But it is quite cunilingual.
Surely it's gonna happend.... eventually. Might not be implanting electrodes into your mouth and your throat but why not? in some other way in a decade from now.
Myself do believe that it is the Insightful post adjust, it should be.
I just Lindsay Lohan's former, the first name I notice you have on the address of your Web. Bastard lucky damn you.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Nothing like technology over intelligence...LOL
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
English to Japanese to English to Japanese to English:
In regard to me good God, it is possible to make brown.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I highly recommend this site to anyone wishing to explore the wonders of language to language machine translation : http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/ It will translate from English to another language then another then another until the results are bemusing to say the least.
"During the demonstration, the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course."
*shakes head*
NO NO NO, they've got it all wrong.. you implant a fish in your ear. That's how you speak multilingual, it's true.. i've read it in a book and even seen it in a movie (it must be true)
Although this might, after a lot of research and development, work marginally well enough when someone reads out-loud a cut-and-dry paper with no colloquial language and simple grammar, I can't see this ever working for normal speech. Slang and grammar evolve too quickly for most dictionaries of a single language -- imagine how hard it would be to maintain a device that is supposed to instantly translate who-knows-how-many different languages (since only having, say, English to French would just be silly). By the time a new chip is released, it will have already been outdated by developments in language, since even just a few small ones, especially new words, can throw off a translator (10 years ago, who knew what "to google something" meant?).
Finally, some scientific achievement that actually helps scientists and nerds....
now if they only develop the "nerdspeak to smooth-talker" module soon....:P
"the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now"
Karl Rove of course ran the electrodes...
Now we also know why Bush seemed so fried during one debate - the same electrodes give him a happy boost and also make him think God talks to him, so he can smite the Muslims.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
is an electrode to insert in my ears so i can listen to what they say...
So, what about just talking one language? Esperanto anyone?, ok so it is not too popular, but we could just talk english.
(PD: my native languaje is spanish)
The crime you described is not unheard of now. An episode of Leave it to Beaver had Eddie teaching Beaver that the spanish phrase for "have a nice supper" was actually something that translated to "your mother sleeps with my dog" or somesuch.
n te_ConsortAgree2005Pub.pdf
How many Star Trek episodes were about mistranslations / misunderstandings?
Human interpreters are encouraged, and may be required to be, certified in some states:
http://www.ncsconline.org/wc/publications/Res_CtI
and you can google dishonest interpreters as well as I can.
That a "newfangled technology" can be used for dishonest purposes should surprise no one. That a CEO should use a computer translater without immediate prior testing or with inadequate security should give some indication of that CEO's ineptitude either in his own ability to choose and deploy technological solutions or his ability to hire people who will do it correctly.
Well, my daily oral-sex post is complete. I think I'll go mod up some trolls now...
By the way, bet you dollars to yen that if you take a look at any commercial piece of translation software the EULA disclaims all liability in general and then lists at least ten industries in which it is absolutely, specifically, positively not intended for use. So they'll pass the buck back to your translator who OK'ed the machine translation, or the person who decided to rely exclusively on machine translation despite the clear, boldface warning on the top line of the EULA to not do so.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Imagine someone hacking your personal translator while you are on a trip abroad:
Hotel clerk: Rooms are 150 Euros a night.
[Translated:] Rooms are 150 Euros a night.
You: I won't pay over $130
[Hack-Translated:] Deal
Hotel clerk: Sign here
I can think of many other scenarios, some funny, some sophomoric, and some downright evil.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Any linguist will tell you that there doesn't yet exist a complete model of any language. Even in English (one of the most heavily-studied and mapped-out grammars in the science), every day there are instances of language use that the best grammars thus far proposed cannot explain -- but that small children who have never encountered that particular use can understand without any difficulty.
Until we can create a complete map of even one living language, let alone two, there is no possible way that we will ever be able to create a reliable translator. At present, we are not even within sight of such a map. Language is one of the most complex behaviors humans engage in. We don't fully understand ourselves how we do what we do with it. Till we ourselves do, how can we possibly create a computer that does?
FTFA and Summary: "...but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course." And in two decades if you don't agree
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
It's an automated complaint letter generator, moron. "Time and effort." Yeah.
Why would you want to speak something other than American? Are you a terrorist?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I think you've mistaken me for the CyricZ at GameFAQs. I am not him. My name actually is Cyric. I think his was Scott, last time I checked. His last name is different than mine, too.
That said, the GameFAQs forums are a horrible place. That is exactly how Internet forums should never be.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
As a Mandarin and English speaker in the US, I'm not sure I completely belive the part about intonation not affecting English. Take for example, my ... er... example:
We're going to the store.
We're going to the store?
We're going to the store!
In example one, it is common to give what would map to the "falling" tone in Mandarin on the last word. In the second example, it wouldn't be unheard of to use the "rising" tone. In the last example, one could use the "flat" tone to express excitement. In written English, it's perhaps a bit easier to see the difference between these sentences, but in spoken English, it's the intonation that really conveys the differences between the three examples.
"Ma" as you're probably using it isn't a word, by the way. It's more of a modifier to the preceding word to indicate a question. It's honestly more like punctuation.
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
We had this nifty thing at school years ago, enabled us to speak 4 different languages, it was called STUDY, in addition the more we understood all these foreign languages the better we came to understand our own.
You never catch me alive
I thought about this question and concluded that there were five levels of translation:
1- word for word translation.
2- phrase translation.
3 - paragraph translation
4 - conversational business level
5 - diplmatic and literary level
I suspect that each level requires an order of magnitude of more computing power than the previous level.
By the scale above, I believe that Babelfish is on level two and SYSTRAN is on level three.
I have used the SYSTRAN box to sell things on eBay to people in other countries that don't speak english. Sent and received e-mails would go into the SYSTRAN box for translation to and from Italian. The sales went well. The funds were placed into my PayPal account and the items shipped by airmail to the buyers. Positive feedback ratings all around.
It's when I realized that the 'Earth was flat', according to Thomas Friedman's bestseller.
We have two words in English which completely change their meaning depending on the tone of speaker. Those words are 'fuck' and 'shit'. The verb 'to fuck' basically means to have sex and the noun 'shit' literally means excrement.
However the f word is used as a general purpose intensifier and the s word as a general noun for contempt. Or it can be any collection of undifferenciated objects.
These words are illegal in most public mass media usages and are socially unacceptable in formal conversation. But their endless variety of use can be explored in popular 'gangster rap' and 'hip-hip' musical styles. This music and R-rated Hollywood films show the usage of the words in average American life and display the wide range of meaning according to their tone.
Whether this is similar to tone usage in Mandarin I don't know.
I got my bachelor's degree in Linguistics at the University of Washington and one of the topics we worked on heavily was syntax structure and computational linguistics. The driving force behind much of that department is to progress the knowledge of language to the point where it can be completely digitized.
The problem with Star-Trek-like speech converters is not in algorithms, language itself, or the computer models we use to represent it. The problem with perfect speech translation is language itself. Language is constantly changing, varied even among small groups of native speakers of the same language, and most of the time no two people use the same word the same way.
An example: To an editor the term newspaper means a product of labor which is created and published on a regular schedule. To a person who has a problem with a housefly newspaper means an instrument with some heft which can be used to crush small insects. It's the same object from a different perspective.
The best we can try to do is find patterns and approximate meanings based on statistical analysis of sources that have already been translated by humans. Combining this with some rudimentary patterns of morphology and sentence structure will allow us to get close. Most of the time we'll be able to get the meaning across.
I think that's the best we'll ever be able to do.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
It's an automated complaint letter generator, moron. "Time and effort." Yeah.
Where can I find this automated complaint letter generator, cocksucker? "No time. No effort." Nay.
Vagina Reefer:
J essica+McCormick
Late 20th Century; A form of cunninglingus, wherein one forms an "O" shape with his/her tongue in order to perform cunninglingus on a female to the point of orgasm, so that when the woman begins to get wet, the person performing cunninglingus can suck up all of the woman's cum into his/her mouth. This name comes from the shape of a joint, which contains marijuana, another word for it being "reefer".
1. "Last night he gave me the good ol' vagina reefer. It felt like a vacuum on my pussy!"
2. "Yeah, girlfriend, my man is like a Hoover vacuum with his vagina reefer!"
Source: Jessica McCormick, Jun 14, 2004
http://www.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=
Babelfish:
...
Ceo zou nu van het begaan van een haatmisdaad de oorzaak zijn, slechts omdat dit apparaat verkeerd vertaalde wat hij, en output racistische opmerkingen zei?
... it is scratched.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Are you serious?
First, it isn't a crime in most nations to start cursing like a sailor.
Second, even if it was a crime, it is pretty clear that if a translation program goes nuts and starts spouting obscenities, it is the translation program's fault. A tech might get sacked for failing to set up the program properly, but that is about it. That is like asking what would happen if someone hired a person to act as a translator and the translator started mistranslating things into obscenities. Uh, the translator gets fired.
Really, this is pretty common sense stuff. Only in bad sitcoms do such misunderstanding last for more then a few seconds.
I like the idea... it would be like the translators from star wars... but this has me worried:
"During the demonstration, the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course."
I would rather have a small hand held device than something implanted in my throat...
Schrodinger's cat- A cat is put in a sealed box. Attached to which is a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas
where there are entire grammatical concepts that are non-existent in English, or vice-versa. For example, I know a fair bit of Japanese, where there is no idea that corresponds to a/an/the/some etc, which are some of the most common words in European languages!
I live in Japan, too, and I completely agree that statistics is going to be only part of the solution. For example, take the following Japanese children's sentence:
Inu wo mita.
This could mean any of the following:
I saw the dog.
I watched the dog.
I looked at the dog.
I saw a dog.
I watched a dog.
I looked at a dog.
I saw some dogs.
I watched some dogs.
I looked at some dogs.
There are probably more as well. Some of these translations are more likely than others but they all depend on context, without which, the cpu is just guessing between several likely translations.
I do not think it is possible for computers to accurately translate until they are almost as intelligent as we are, and can understand context. However, the statistical approach can probably get us passible loose translations by itself.
There has been a long-running trend in science, exemplified by the winners of the Nobel Prize. The age at which Prize winners (and other researchers as well) do their prize-winning work is occuring later and later in life. This is because each generation has to spend more and more time just climbing up the back of the giants whose shoulders upon which we stand. Now it is typical for a PhD to be in his or her early thirties before his or her first "real" job with significant responsibility and salary, and likely in their forties before they control a significant number of workers and financial resources. This number just keeps moving backwards.
Even at the rate of three journal papers a day (which is serious mental lifting if done thoroughly), it now takes almost a year for one someone with the appropriate training to get a good grasp of a field tangential but close to their own. There are literally thousands of papers to read!
See: http://logos-os.dfki.de/
Since a few days this problem should be solved a few steps better - OpenLogos 1.0.0 has been released.
Like the german tech site heise reported last wednesday the GlobalWare AG published in cooperation with the DFKI (The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence: "Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz") the free (as in speech and as in beer) translation system OpenLogos 1.0.0.
It's a PostgreSQL-based, command-line, GPL-licensed translator for Linux, which core is from 1967 but now has the according database to translate from/to english to/from french, german, italian, portuguese and spanish (where a direct tranlation from german to french or spanish is additionaly possible).
OpenLogos is meant to be a hybrid (mixture between static data and linguistic rules) translation system as a basic system for universities and other research centers to develop further going hybrid translation technologys.
Future versions of OpenLogos will include other database backends and a GUI.
Don't like babelfish? Make it better - the base system is there now.
I lag
Where did you grow up? In California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, there have been significant Hispanic populations since before any English speakers were there. New Mexico is officially a bilingual state (bet you didn't know that). But I agree that the Hispanic population in the US has grown tremendously, recently, and even in the mid-west there are more and more signs in Spanish, more cable and radio stations in Spanish, etc. But as they said in West Side Story, Puerto Rico's in America, and it's been that way for a long, long time. I think the mere existence of our Mexican border provides a "compelling reason" to learn Spanish.
I don't think Mandarin or Arabic will have such strongholds in the Americas any time soon. For one thing, "Arabic" is not really a single language. There's the Arabic on TV, which is some strange derivative of liturgical Arabic, but is no one's native tongue. Like an Esperanto of Arabic. Iranians speak Farsi, which is not a Semitic language, and neither is Turkish, which is the source of so many immigrants in Europe (especially Germany and Holland, although France has a ton of North Africans). Most of the Muslim immigrants I've met have been Indian or Pakistani; Pakistanis speak Urdu, which is Hindi with a bunch of Arabic words mixed in. Written Arabic (Koran) is pretty universal, like a Bible in Latin, but is spoken by no one.
I would love to see a trilingual society throughout the Americas, with English, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken everywhere. There are almost as many speakers of Portuguese as there are of all the Arabic dialects combined, but almost all speakers of Portuguese are in Brazil or the African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and speak a language that is more or less mutually comprehensible, thick accents withstanding. I must admit that I do have trouble understanding Portuguese of Portugal, but there are only about 10 million people compared to 186 million Portuguese speakers in Brazil. Portuguese is ranked about 5th or 6th in the world's most commonly spoken languages, neck and neck with Arabic (all dialects) and Bengali. Now that would be something interesting--if all the Indian and Bangladeshi immigrants made the Bengali language popular in the US. But Portuguese, being a Romance language with strong similarities to Spanish AND English, has a better shot, I think.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
I believe I read this recently:
http://simulatedcomicproduct.com/index.php?cid=21
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Your post, in which you try to dispell the view that you are bigot, just clarifies that in your mind there is fundamental difference between people. Good people, like you, who are not to be mistaken for people who might be Jewish, Christian, or whater, and bad people, those who might be Jewish, Christian, or whatever.
There are differences between people, no question. A person can be good or bad regardless of their religion, but religion is adherence to certain dogma. Each religion has its own dogma, and I don't subscribe to any of them. In that way, yes, I am fundamentally different from "religious" people, who accept a certain set of rules that depend on their religion. But I know plenty of people who consider themselves "spiritual" without being religious, going to church, etc. Dogma of any sort is incompatible with independent thought, by definition: dogma you accept without thought. It is certainly possible to accept certain religious tenets while excluding others, but any person who "cherry-picks" the ideas they like could not be considered religious.
This black-and-white, good and evil, categorization, made before you even know a person, shows you are an extremist yourself. Judge by category. Hate by category.
See, this statement just shows me you don't have any brains, because I never made any "black/white" or "good/evil" distinctions. I also never said I hate anyone. Do you have reading comprehension problems, AC? Or do you just want to put words in my mouth because your own argument is so weak? The nice thing about religion is that people segregate themselves based on their ideology. If someone tells me they are a certain religion, then I don't have to meet them to know a lot about them: they have already told me their basic philosophy. If someone tells me he is a Nazi, do I have to get to know him intimately to realize I don't like his ideology?
Tell me, would your post have been less reliable if you had not said you are not Jewish? You must think so. This shows even more how fundamentalist you are. You think that the credibility of a post is called into question even though the topic (language) has nothing to do with religion. Why is that? Because all Jews, Christians, etc. have a plan to decieve and lie about unrelated things?
I said I am not Jewish because if I were, I would probably know much more about Ben-Yehuda and the Hebrew language. But it is also true that I might be inclined to make biased statements (not the same as lying / intentionally deceiving) if I were Jewish. It's all about perspective. For example, what is the oldest monotheistic religion? Jews will say Judaism, while others might say Zoroastrianism. Who's right? I don't know, but I would be most likely to trust a scholar without any conflicts of interest. It's perfectly natural for someone to want to champion his own cause, and selectively believe the pieces of information that jibe with his point of view.
That you think language (and particularly Hebrew) has nothing to do with religion really shows your ignorance. Jews believe every letter of the Torah has significance, and that God's Hebrew name has tremendous power. Muslims similarly believe that God spoke to Mohammed in Arabic, and the Koran is not really valid if translated into another language. Some fundamentalist Christians, for who knows what reason, adhere to the English-language Bible literally, discounting the translations, retranslations, omissions, and additions of 2000 years worth of monks.
Go on, protect yourself. But don't forget to mention that you are not a scientist (since some of them have created terrible things)
Actually,
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
You comments regarding the errors inherent in machine translation or cogent, but there's also much room for error with human translation. When it's REALLY IMPORTANT to get it right, I believe that multiple translators should be emplyed to do so. For instance, George H.W. Bush mumbles something that he wants to communicate to Nicolas Sarkozy. Bush's translator, who I will call Robert Johnson, is a native speaker of American English (and not for political reasons alone), who has a degree in French and fifteen years of experience as a translator. Johnson then emails the original and French version of Bush's mumblings to his counterpart in the French government, Mme. DuBois, who is a native speaker of French with a degree in English and ten years of experience as a translator, and she suggests some changes to Mr. Johnson's translation that make the meaning more clear. Johnson and DuBois agree on a final version, and submit this to Mme. DuBois' supervisor, who then chooses a translator unknown to DuBois, M. Grosjean, and has the document translated back into English. The French government sends this translation to the American government, who then assigns a Dr. George Hapgood to work with M. Grosjean, and after some discussion Grosjean and Hapgood submit the translation back to English, which is then given to George Bush, who will then raise an alarm only if there are significant deviations in meaning between what he originally said and what he received back.
I have no idea if this actually happens with important documents like peace treaties and party invitations among world leaders, but I hope that they do.
Those examples describe sentence tonality, not word tonality. The point is that English does not have a "minimal pair" of words that differ only in word tonality. It would be as if "store" in "We're going to the store?" had two different meanings, pronounced with slightly tonality. The overall tonality of the sentence would still be rising, as in any question.
This phenomenon exists in Norwegian (and Swedish), in pairs like bønder/bønner (same pronounciation, slightly different spelling) and tømmer/tømmer. I don't know Mandarin, but supposedly it has a lot more than just two different tones.
It can be multi-odor, however.