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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."
"This is a bit of science fiction," said Alex Waibel, director of the International Center for Advanced Communications Technologies, "but it is a vision that we think is very exciting." This is a vision they are having. It is the first step of a process that they achieved. They don't have a product out that you can try for yourself. They aren't even saying it is ready for the real world. They simply were able to translate muscle movement from your mouth into real words. Just like any other technology, they have reached their prototype. I'm not sure where exactly you think they "finally cracked the problem of machine translation".
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).
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.