Slashdot Mirror
Computer Translator Ready for Testing in Iraq
cgibby98 wrote to mention a Wired News story about a battle-zone translation technology that may allow near real-time conversations between English and Arabic speakers. From the article: "Funded by Darpa, the system would allow troops to communicate in Arabic through a laptop computer equipped with voice recognition and translation software. Troops could speak in English and have their words instantly translated into Iraqi Arabic, 'spoken' by a computerized man's voice. The program also translates Arabic into English. Will it replace the need for an interpreter when you're having some sort of high-level conversation? Absolutely not. But it is absolutely to the point where it could be useful in some carefully chosen situations."
But will it report when the interrogation turns to illegal torture, like a live human might?
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make install -not war
Language butchers YOU!
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
But it is absolutely to the point where it could be useful in some carefully chosen situations.
Seems like you could say that for any new, generally unproven, technique
This have disaster writed all over it!
Will it fit in my ear?
I wonder why they chose a man's voice and not the voice of a female infidel!
I'm guessing that there's going to be some sort of face attachment so that soldiers can use both hands to do soldierly things, like holding weapons. While a real time translator is extremely cool I can only imagine how uncool someone in full combat armor and a computerized voice coming from a completely hidden face breaking through my door would be.
Trusting a computer to do real-time translation in a volatile, war-torn region...
English: "We applaud the creation of your new constitution and are preparing to pull our troops out of the country so that the rebuilding process can begin."
Arabic: "All your base are belong to us."
One more invention that gets us closer to Star Trek-tech reality.
Have that thing read the Koran from arabix to english and then vice versa, then by the number offended devided by all moslims gives you a nice error rate.
...especially to people who grew up watching star trek. Really though it's most important because the technology can eventually eliminate the need for trade languages, which can eventually erode the use of local, cultural language. Since we [predominantly] think in language, people who speak different languages think differently and that is valuable. At the same time, it will probably never eliminate the need for fluent human translators, because sentience appears to be a necessary quality for the best command of language.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Will it be able to instantly start translating from an alien language that it has never heard before as soon as the other person appears on the main viewer?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm only doing this to fund my College, so don't make me shoot
That's not Napalm, that's MK77
We have an Embedded Reporter, we will be handing out Sweets and having a laugh
I don't know when your government or mine is going to pull me out of here either.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Stop! Don't run! We are your friends!
"My Hovercraft is full of eels!"
I hope Alexander Yacht* wasn't on the development team!
*Obscure Monty Python reference
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
The translator works very well in Iraq and the US.
I for one, welcome our Fishspeaker overlords.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I'd always wanted to know how to say "Get the fuck on the ground or i'll blow your fucking head off." in Arabic.
I've thought of an implementation like this for some time, only I was thinking of the added element of sampling the user's voice with phonemes in the language to be translated to and then averaging that sound sample with the computer so that you could hear it somewhat spoken in the user's voice. Eventually, this would be a simple headset that could be worn, and you'd talk into a microphone and have some speakers around your ears broadcast what you said in translated form. Those speakers could also be a sort of unidirectional microphone for picking up on the foreign language-speaker's voice and translating it back.
It'd be for one-to-one conversations, of course.
Unless we get to a point where we can separate individual voices in real time and then translate them and have the computer dynamically assign a digital voice to each of the translations so we don't get a jumbled conversation.
I tried out the online demo that works through the web browser. I wondered what "I hope the weather is clement when you arive" would translate into. You get:
"durka durka mohammed jihad durka durka"
Super!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
So now the soldiers can march around Iraq saying "My hovercraft is full of eels" in Arabic.
Or maybe "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO U.S.".
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
American Soldier: We are here to help you my Iraqi friends.
*translator buzzes, whistles*
Translator: Derk Derk Allah, Muhammad Jihad. Paka Sherpa Sherpa, Bakallah.
I'm curious how "What's up?" or "Holy crap!" is translated ...
YES FINALLY when the Iraqi's threaten to cut your throat they will not misunderstand it for "I love you"
This sounds like just the thing for talking to streetwalkers in Tijuana.
Iraqi: "Let me get my ID in my pocket, please, Mr. nice american soldier who is freeing my country"
Machine translation: "I have a detonator in my pocket, you zionist"
Soldier: "die, focker! Four more years!"
My hovercraft is full of eels!
Or we could build a translator that will change sentences that they don't like to sentences that they do like. Example: "I will drop napalm on your town" could translate to "I dig that Allah dude".
...I will laugh my ass off.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
one step closer to my fembot fantasy girlfriend, featuring(Audrey UK)'s voice from http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.
Was anybody else reminded of the translators used by the aliens in Mars Attacks! when reading this? http://imdb.com/title/tt0116996/
I guess it had to be a man's voice, otherwise what the hell is it doing outside without a male companion? They'd have to do a kill -honor arabictran
Fuck it
I managed something similar a year or so back, in an attempt to create a 'babelfish'. Of course the input/output had to be specified, and it had a very limited range of languages - certainly no universal translator but it did use all free software (as that's all I have).
h p
0) Input recording of English languagge
1) Voice recognition software (Sphinx) pipes output to
2) Script using online translator to convert between language
3) Festival stumbles out an imhuman gramatically-wrong rendition of the input.
It wasn't exactly in realtime, I just fed it recordings, for which it would then output an audio file in the other language. The worst step was the voice recognition, which didn't work great even when given the output of the voice syntethisier.
Sphinx http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.p
English: We are here to save you!
Translation: We are here to collect you!
Seems to work fine to me!
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
I guess these scientists never saw Mars Attacks.
But it is absolutely to the point where it could be useful in some carefully chosen situations."
... So much for the diplomacy and professionalism the US officer was trying to convey.
I think it is far more useful than many people realize given that many people have too much faith in human translators. I was watching a discovery channel episode of "Off to War" and a US officer had his men hold their fire when they saw armed insurgents because they were not sure where the Iraqi police attached to the unit were. Afterwards the US officer tells the translator to tell the police that he had to hold his fire because he did not know where they were and that they must let him know when they leave the group. Subtitles show that the translator really says something like: You idiots! You completely screwed up the mission
I've seen alot of videos on the Net which show abuse by American soldiers, most of the times triggered because there is no proper translator around to at least -explaint- some of the actions being taken.
A shame I have to post this as an AC...
Administration-enabled translator: We are so happy that you love America for toppling your eeeeeeevil dictatorship!
American soldier 2: Hoo yah, we're gonna git us some awl!
Administration-enabled translator: We are going to train you to defend yourselves before we leave!
American soldier 3: Dude, I was totally kidding about your sister
Administration-enabled translator: Why do you HATE FREEDOM?!
American soldier 4: See, we worship the same thing, really - God, Allah, means the same thing!
Administration-enabled translator: Praise JESUS!
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
From a crackling loudspeaker on the hummer's roof: "My hovercraft is full of eels!"
I would really like to believe this is true, and I hesitate to admit a lack of trust in soldiers to follow this common sense guideline. Still, it is all too easy to imagine situations in which time is limited, stress is high, and this new translator is the only thing available.
Absolutely !
That was the first thing that occurred to me too.
That alone could make it worth it's weight in lives.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Klingon: Don't catch any bugs! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The problem is, it translates into:
"Have sex with dirt or I'll have oral sex with your head which is having sex with nothing"
He might think you're coming onto him.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Arabic: "Praise Allah"
Computer say: "Get the F out, these crazies are about to blow themselves up"
Look, I'm not trying to sound negative here, but unless this conflict draws really really long, I don't really believe these devices will ever hit the streets of Baghdad. All the talk about the possible use of this technology in Iraq serves only to justify all the millions being spent on these machine translation projects.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
english is not my mother tongue
Let's hope Douglas Adam's words re the universal translator, the Babel fish,that "Caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in history" is not prophetic.
They were saying something like "Somebody set us up the bomb."
Just what we need, a computer turning English into "Hacking Phlegm and Flu-ish" sounding language and a "Pnuemonia-ese" to English.
I have yet to see how it can cope with needing to change the syntax of a sentence (English is unique with its sentence structure and the ordering of the words) let alone dealing with the differences in the way everybody speaks, and do it in real time.
It sound like there will be a lot of raised eyebrows when the computer turns "Hi, How are you doing?" into "All your base are belong to us !"
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
I read another story about this technology in a Time magazine article called "5 New Things that will Blow your Mind"
1 118338-5,00.html
See: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
"...your Pocket PC, equipped with IBM's Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator. MASTOR recognizes both Mandarin and English, automatically translating what it hears into the other tongue, so two people who speak different languages can have a conversation."
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"No one in the military would make life or death decisions based on a machine translation." That's pure CYA for the first time this device gets someone killed. If a life or death decision needs to be made and the only thing you have at hand is a machine translation, what are you going to use?
a rmy">James T. Fallows, "The U.S. military does everything in Iraq worse and slower than it could if it solved its language problems. It is unbelievable that American fighting ranks have so little help. Soon after Pearl Harbor the U.S. military launched major Japanese-language training institutes at universities and was screening draftees to find the most promising students. America has made no comparable effort to teach Arabic. Nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq the typical company of 150 or so U.S. soldiers gets by with one or two Arabic-speakers. T. X. Hammes says that U.S. forces and trainers in Iraq should have about 22,000 interpreters, but they have nowhere near that many. "
I don't know how representative of the state of the art they are, but I've been massively underwhelmed at Babelfish's ability to understand foreign-language text and by ViaVoice's ability to understand speech. I can't imagine the effect of layering machine translation errors on top of machine voice interpretation errors.
According to href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-
Instead of doing the obvious thing--give soldiers training in Arabic and offer big bonuses for Arabic-speaking recruits--the U.S. does nothing for a couple of years and then tries to throw a cheap technical fix at the problem.
If we must throw gadgets at the problem, why not a satellite phone linked to a big building full of human Arabic/English simultaneous translators?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
oblig hgttg ref, thx.
^^
"I'm sorry sir, the computer didn't hear you. Please speak clearly into the barrel."
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
James T. Fallows
This time I DID press "preview..."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Hail fnord Eris!
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make install -not war
WOW!
....oh wait, thats the case now.... how will this help?
Now we will be able to invade countries and kill their people, because we need to remove their evil dictators (that we instated) as an excuse to steal (pronounced "secure") their oil.
Without even having to understand their culture!!!
Move along... there is no sig here.
On many occasions, it's been shown that if the pidgin language is used consistently around kids, they'll start using it, but just add in all this extra grammatical stuff that they expect to hear but don't - and then the language is said to become "creolized".
Also: we don't predominantly think in language. We think in something that's more base than, and was prior to, language. Everyone always hears that decades-old, long-ago-disproven Whorfian line, that people (in the same species, with the same neurological makeup) actually think differently according to what language they speak - but no one's buying it anymore except those Psych 101 students who are going to major in elementary education instead of cognitive development.
I'm a language dork so I feel like I HAVE to comment every time I see language stuff on /. Except for all those "it's"es where it should be "its". Those, I can let you guys have.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Home by Christmas.
Will it have a picture of Linda Park (Ensign Hoshi Sato) on the desktop?
There are no stupid questions, But there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots.
...I totally agree - once it works.
I went to school in a military college in Quebec. One of its aims was to make us fluently bilingual (French and English) and a lot of effort was spent on that. All communications outside the classroom switched language every two weeks, we got 5 classes of instruction per week, and we spent two months one summer on a full-bore language training programme.
And after 4 years of this, I was indeed fluently bilingual. (Je suis billingue)
BUT - it took 4 years of constant immersion to get there, French and English are reasonably similar (same alphabet, mostly the same sounds, a lot of shared words, reasonably similar grammar) and I still can't do a very good job of translating. In fact, I didn't really start to be able to function in French until I was comfortable enough with it to THINK in French (pense en francias). If I think in French, I'm fine. If I have to think in english and then speak in French (or vice versa) there's a kind of mental clashing of gears; it's like the speech centre and the comprehension centre are in one place, and the translation centre is in another.
So I can watch a French movie, no problem. But ask me to provide a running translation of the dialogue in English, and I can't do it - not without falling way behind. Translation is HARD.
Plus, from personal experiance, trying to communicate with somebody when you share very little language is very, very frustrating - for both of you - even in the most benign circmstances. It's a stressor. Now try it when one or both participants in the conversation are in fear for their lives... it's an easy way for tempers and emotions to get stoked way high.
And that's with French, which was relatively easy. Arabic reads right-to-left, has no shared alphabet with romantic languages, shares few sounds, and has a completely different grammar. I can't imagine how long it would take to be able to speak fluent Farsi or Pashtun - but yet, some day, my life might depend on it.
If we can develop a working real-time translator, it's going to make a lot of people's lives a lot easier. It will be a de-escalator when it comes to conflict resolution - and by far the best way to resolve conflicts is peacefully. Ask any soldier.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
that it will use clippy from microsoft office fame...
sig goes here!
...in 3... 2... 1...
(Come one, you know you want to!)
remember Mars Attacks , and its alien translator ?
just a thought...
There were some problems with the early prototypes. Some examples:
"How many miles to Babylon?" was translated into Arabic as "My hovercraft is full of eels."
And in Arabic "America go home!" was translated into English "My nipples explode with delight."
See the full transcript for the full details.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It takes slashdot a while to catch up, but troops were using similar devices since the initial invasion. I recall it was called the phrasolator.
My sources tell me that this has been in heavy use by the CIA for some time, at secret installations in Eastern Europe. I guess, it took time to ramp up for Iraq as there was an expected increase in vocabulary. Apparently for the CIA the device merely had to handle screaming and whimpering of the word 'No' for the various languages in use.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Good point, but with all the snooped/recorded cell traffic that's already collected from around the world, they can't hire enough Arabic-speaking analysts as it is... Now, if we 1) replaced our troops with gun-toting robots, 2) trained some of those former troops to speak Arabic, 3) linked the killbots to a building with Arabic/English translators, 4) ?????, 5) PROFIT!!! This message brought to you by Lynne Chen3y and all the fine folks at Halliburton.
^^
The important thing is that these translators aren't gay. That's what really matters in America and the US military, isn't it?
(As I've said before, I'd rather be covered by a gay guy who thought I was hot than by a homophobe who thought I was gay.)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I guess there's a moderator who either has a terminal lack of a sense of humor or hasn't seen Mars Attacks so doesn't know the context of the above quote.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But even the best computerized translation is still prone to errors.
No matter how good the technology of translation gets, it will be "prone to errors" for the simple reason that we don't understand language well enough to program any kind of computer to do it well.
Even the grammars* of the best-studied languages cannot yet be adequately model and described in a way that accounts for all the uses to which people put it in everyday situations, let alone in exceptional circumstances such as war. A five-year-old native speaker of a language has a better grasp of how the language functions than the best linguists have been able to model.
Nor can the technological obstacles be easily overlooked. Even if we had a thorough model of a single language, we would then need a point-for-point map connecting the model to an analogous model for the target languange, for a translation not to be "prone to errors". And given how quickly language changes, and given the range of variations of usage from place to place, the computational requirements for simply building a model of a single language are staggering. The requirements for mapping two complete models to each other, and for keeping up with changes in usage, vocabulary, pronunciation, and so on, are simply prohibitive under current technology.
I dream of the day when our technology is able to perform such tasks. But until the linguists have succeeded in building a thorough, credible model of even one living language, I don't intend to hold my breath.
Nifty idea, though.
* By "grammar" I don't mean the rules Miss Grundy tried to drill into your head. I mean the set of (mostly unconscious) rules that a speaker uses to build an utterance and to parse the utterances of others.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
"it could be useful in some carefully chosen situations."
I do not think a combat zone qualifies as "carefully chosen situation"...
The intelligence agencies are in a sticky situation. If they don't go far enough to prevent an attack, they are charged with not having done enough. If they do go far enough and their methods become public, they are charged with going too far. The intelligence game is a tough business and if you are forced to play by the rules you are going to lose. In my opinion they should go as far as they think they need to go. Unfortunately this will probably result in some innocent people getting hurt, but in my opinion it's a simple numbers game: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Granted I don't think terrorism is any more of a threat today than it was 5 years ago (at least not on our home soil), but it's worth investigating every lead if you can save a few lives here and there.
I think it's kind of funny how Zarqawi is doing "damange control" (LOL!) about the recent bombings in Jordan. "We bombed the hotels because Americans and Israelis stay there. Sorry about blowing the shit out of those 50+ Jordanians at the wedding party and only managing to kill 4 Americans. My bad."
Soon after Pearl Harbor the U.S. military launched major Japanese-language training institutes at universities and was screening draftees to find the most promising students. America has made no comparable effort to teach Arabic.
Ask yourself what would be more difficult...
Teaching the language of an orderly society of highly focused, cultured, philosophical, well mannered warriors and scholars.
or
Teaching the language of unruly, inbred, goat-humping, nomadic tribemen.
At least they got the English-to-Arabic working though. It was stuck in beta for the longest time while they tried to figure out why "Dick Cheney" kept getting translated as "Allah."
Uhura's metal earpiece? Image here. Note Earpiece in left ear.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Body language plays a clear part in these sorts of situations. The Iraqis aren't stupid- they see the US officer saying something carefully and quietly and calmly...and then the translator starts waving his arms around and calling them idiots, I think they have a pretty good idea that the translator is full of shit, or at least that the US officer isn't the one being rude.
Let's put it this way- if the US officer came over and started yelling and waving his arms around, and the translator says "The general wishes to express his slight displeasure with how the operation went, but asks that you honor him by coming to dinner"...do you really think they're not going to realize the translator is fluffing things?
I strongly suspect the translator was taking the cushy-nice-guy talk which would earn the soldier zero respect, and -fully- translating it into something the Iraqi police would expect. It's like the difference between a project meeting to decide how to fix the mail server, versus a construction site. Your boss doesn't say, "hey ya stupid moron, ya dropped that SCSI disk and now we're gonna be 3 days behind! Get yer ass into the server room and if you don't have 20 machines racked by the end of the day, don't show up tomorra!", and a construction supervisor doesn't say, "Hey Charlie, how's it going? Your kid feeling better? Yeah, about backing up the cement mixer into the side of the building. Well, next time, please be a little more careful and maybe solicit Bob's help next time in making sure there's adequate clearance."
Please help metamoderate.
"I'm not sure Sargent, but I think he just said all our base, are belong to him"
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
Which one do Americans speak again? I'm confused. Your post seems to suggest the latter.
When students go to translator school, they have to do a test. They get a text through headphones in their native language and have to repeat it "live" in a microphone while new text keeps on comming. Very few pass this test. They become interpreters, the others become translators. I speak five languages myself, of which 4 reasonably fluent. I will rarely make mistakes while talking to one person, but put me in a multi-language group where I have to keep on switching every other sentence and in the end I will simply adress someone in the wrong language.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Bullshit. You clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject and are pulling crap out of your ass. They already do offer bonuses to qualified recruits based on their ability to speak foreign languages. And do you really think they're not cranking out arabic linguists as fast as they can? It takes 9 months to a year to train a non-arabic speaker to speak well enough to just barely get by. It then usually takes an additional year of real-life exposure before they truly become proficient. Furthermore, the language program only takes those who score in the top 5% on their aptitude tests, and of those they do accept, fully half still wash out. You may think it's just a matter of teaching all the infantry grunts a half dozen canned phrases, but making a usable translator out of someone is a hell of a lot harder than teaching them to shoot a machine gun. This all I know, being a former soldier with the 101st Airborne (311th MI bn, "Eyes of the Eagle") and a graduate myself of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Nothing to see here... you know... first the computer-aided traslation that sounds computerized then ceramic armor. Next the clone army? And you always wondered why they sound so goofy in those helmets, didn't you?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Dear Mr. President:
I hereby give notice of my resignation as President-VICE effective Dec. 1, 2005 because
I have to catch a plane to my new home in Uzbekistan.
Seditiously,
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney
"The infidels have trapped the soul of an Iraqi in a sorcerer's box and are forcing him to act as a translator, thus preventing him from ascending to paradise?! KILL THEM!!!"
What we really need for the troops are not just language tanslators; but cultural translators. Some things are easy to teach (don't address a man's wife, don't reach out with the wrong hand); but others are more difficult.
Perhaps most difficult is how to defuse a situation after a cultural gaffe has been made.
Multiply this even more as the issues get larger. The notions we have about self-determination are different from theirs, for instance.
We need to understand these differences before we can pretend to give them the things they're "lacking".
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Where are the weapons of mass destruction ?
Being a translator or an interpreter is hard. Speaking a language isn't - it just requires time, and a degree of dedication.
It does indeed take many years to train a reliable interpreter (at a minimum, a three year university degree in the language and then 1-2 further years of interpreter training), but your reference to aptitude tests highlights the second problem: your reference to "aptitude tests".
Why bother with aptitude tests?Everyone can learn a foreign language. Or at least, anybody who managed to master a mother tongue can. The people who say they're "useless at languages" are the ones who tell themselves that they're useless: ie., they can't be bothered to apply themselves. But, immersed in a country - as a US soldier in Iraq is - and with sufficient motivation, you could very easily teach Arabic on a large scale to the officers at the very least - and possibly to the infantry as well. It's just a question of cost, but, expensive as good language teachers are, it would still only be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall cost of prosecuting this ludicrous war.
As for motivation - I suspect that your average infantry grunt would not be hugely motivated to learn Arabic. But try this: "Making an effort in this class could very easily save your life tomorrow." I suspect that could make a big difference...
that they would prefer for us to go away.
It's probably easier to get English - Arabic translators if there's no chance of them getting killed....
Just don't offshore it, nobody needs an Arabic translator with an Indian accent. (joke, folks.)
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
My guess is no.
Will the translation come out in ogg?
Sorry, this is the parent poster. I retract my statement, since based on further research, the grandfather post's ideas could be implemented, albeit with some difficulty.
Couple of weeks in, and you've got enough to do "Halt, or I shoot".
Hmm. Combine this with a little badge, indicating knowledge of "30/100/300" words, and local distribution of word cards...
"My hovercraft is full of eels"
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I agree with your points. Violence is the only language understood westerners. Their lies and hypocrisy renders any intellectual dialogue useless. This new technical mimic is bound to fail at the hands of such ignorant and self-righteous people. The only way to restore world order is to rid the world of this great scourge. In particular, through the annihilation of the white people. The up rising of the Iraqis and African French is only the beginning. As the rest of the world wake up to the atrocities of the white man, Euro up and America will be under siege once again.
This is the real person who posed the question if the great grandparent poster knows anything about phonetics. I still am pretty sure the person doesn't know anything about phonetics in general, or about the phonology of Arabic, in particular.
Probably not if it's owned by the military.
Given that and your experience, would you say that kicking out 37+ students because they're gay is a great strategic move?
Reminds me of Jimmy Carter's visit to Poland. The translater they hired made one goof after another - something US officials suspected as they saw smiles and laughs from the audience. One gaffe I remember is that Carter said, "I have a great love for the Polish people" and it came out as "I have a great lust for the Polish people."
Hey, did anybody consider that there is not the Arabic out there? When we're talking about the Arabic, it's basically a synthetic language, set up by islamic scholars sometime between the 7th and 10th century. There was so much trouble reading the Qur'an, they needed to write a prescriptive grammar and dictionary which cannot be backed up by older texts other than the Qur'an itself. This is a major problem with rabic.
Aside from that, Arabic differs so much from one country to another, you can't just set up something to translate it. It's like saying English and German are Germanic languages, so let's make a translator from Germanic (ie Eglsih or German or Danish or dutch) to Chinese. It won't work (I'm talking about the present). Vowel qualities differ so much, there's no chance to match two regions. Heere again the problem lies with the Arabic, it's a sacred language and nobody would say he or she is talking something like Iraqi or Moroccan, they all speak Arabic. If you lose your language, you lost part of your identity.
Okay, this looks somehow Orientalist but nevertheless, there is a problem with speaking about plain Arabic, it's a bit more complicated.
Actually, when I saw the article, Mars Attacks was the first thing that came to mind.
I *know* I will be moderated troll or flamebait, but there is just something about phrases like "Do not be afraid" "we are your friends" "we come in peace!" blaring out of the 'translator' being wielded by hopped-up-on-amphetamine US troops ready to shoot anyone at the slightest provocation...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Americans speak something in between: a language of highly focused, unruly, inbred, goat-humping, warriors and scholars. BooRAH!
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Will you go back to my place bouncy bouncy ?
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Terrific...life and death translations being done by a program...we'll be reading about this on comp.risks before too long.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Let's call it "The Babelfish"
I am Spartacus
Funded by Darpa[...]
I could have sworn it was funded by Durka Durka...
but can it translate between English and American?
I posted this a few years ago, but I think a lot of it is still relevant:
1 3 for original
I used to study linguistics. It is very interesting, but also makes you feel very humble. Human language has far more subtleties than most people credit it with. It is true that if you're a Chomskian, you will tend to see languages as more similar than different (the opposite of most non-academic views). However, even if you do believe in Universal Grammar and all that the idea entails, it has to be said that there are some fundamental difficulties in machine translation. As I'm not in the field, I don't know if they've been solved yet, but I imagine they haven't reconciled the:
1) Differences in language syntactic structure. How do you reconcile a VSO language with an OSV language and still maintain real-time processing? More specifically, if, in, say, language 1 one would form a sentence like "John buys milk" (Subject-Verb-Object, like English) but in lanuguge two you would say "buys milk John", how do you begin to immediately translate, word for word, when the words are not in the same order? Answer is, you don't. The longer and more clausal the sentence gets, the more or a problem this becomes. This assumes the translator is going to have to decide where to pause so it can rearrange the sentence, parse and translate it. This is fine, except that:
2) Natural speech doesn't necessarily follow the same rules as written language. So the speaker many not speak in nice, neat, parseable chunks. So the translation machine has to start making some decisions. For the benefit of the doubt, let's say that we're going to pause nicely after each complete sentence to let the translator do its work. You still have the problem of:
3) Context. A.k.a. the "frame" problem (to some degree, though not exactly). Computers have no context w/ regards to language (they have no actual experiential knowledge of meaning), and thus have no concept of relevance (if you believe in Relevance theory pragmatics). They have no basis upon which to "guess" at word meaning or pull meaning out of inferential utterances -- no basis which to understand sarcasm, humor, hyberbole, or anything your lit professor taught about -- and here's the kicker folks, all of that plays a role in figuring out meaning, which is usually the tiebreaker in any case of:
4) Ambiguity. Wonder why Babelfish only works half the time? Because idiomatic expressions exist. Because words are ambiguous -- one word can have multiple meanings and multiple words can mean the same thing. One word can have different meanings to different people. (BTW, if you want to explode your head, just *begin* to study semantics).
This will probably be another "nobody will ever need more than 16k of RAM" quote, but I think we'll have a hell of a time getting machine translation up to human standards until the machine is thinking for itself. Not that i'm arguing it can't be done, it's just not as straightforward as L&H, or IBM, or the Office of Naval Research would have you believe.
see http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/19/22222
just my blog and pix
I have multiple personality disorder.
I would imagine that this would help someone who is Deaf enjoy a speech or gathering without requiring an interpretor. Intepretors aren't always available and this would allow them to attend any speech without having to schedule it far in advance. It would just need to translate the speech into text, instead of a translated voice. Kind of like a real life portable Closed Caption machine.
Obviously this wouldn't help a hearing impaired person in a social setting since they would need a way to communicate back, since the device only interprets voice.
But I think that would be a really cool use of something like this, it would definitely open a few more opportunities for the hearing impaired.
--
Brandon Petersen
http://www.brandonpetersen.com/
Is this a reference to some infuriating computer game where you have to do all sorts of nonsensical random activities before it lets you progress?
Freedom: "I won't!"
Non-Obligaroty, Offtopic Family Guy Reference
"Holy crap! Uhura's black?"
It's okay, some of us get the reference :)
PS: everyone else, Snopes has the scoop.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Arabic is not that easy to learn, it makes learning german or french look like a walk in the park. A Staff Sgt from my unit spent 3 years taking arabic classes, because if he passed the test, he would have gotten a $50,000 bonus. He failed miserably, as did 95% of his classmates.
The only way to get truly good at arabic is to learn it while very young.
I'm stationed in central Iraq, and think this software would be great as a backup tool. I've never used this hardware, so I can't comment on how well it really works.
At the moment, I'd stick with my Iraqi 'terps for day to day operations. I have 9 working for me now, I trust all of them. Typically they're screened by a US Company, and are pretty smart guys who love their country.
Where they prove to be extra valuable is when they use their "Arab-sense". They can tell where people are from by the way they talk, or look. They know the difference between Iraqi and Syrian Arabic... and even between cities in Iraq. They're great at defusing situations, and act as my eyes and ears when working with locals/Iraqi soldiers. They are also able communicate my intent without directly translating my words. Sometimes a direct translation isn't the best way to go, as it can be confusing. If needed, they can further clarify what I'm trying to convey. That's why I like to call them my 'terps, instead of translators. Strict translation may be OK in certain situations, but when you're in a hot situation having someone interpret can be necessary.
There are 22 Arab countries in the Arab League. Not a single dialect is similar to the other. And nobody speaks the classical Arabic taught at schools!
Because it'd doubtless be outsourced to India and then no one would understand what's being said.
Current military training already only turns out people at proficiency level 2 on a scale of 1-5. It takes 10 months to a year to train an arabic linguist to this bare minimum level. That's just the way it is. It's arabic, not mexican spanish.
but your reference to aptitude tests highlights the second problem: your reference to "aptitude tests". Why bother with aptitude tests?Everyone can learn a foreign language
Anyone can learn a foreign language, provided it's not TOO foreign, like French or German, and they have the time to study. You can't lump all foreign languages together. Not everyone can learn chinese, pashtun, arabic, or farsi quickly enough and proficiently enough to make training them in it worthwhile.
Or at least, anybody who managed to master a mother tongue can.
I'd argue you've just disqualified a full sixty percent of potential applicants. You need some grasp of basic grammar concepts before you can even begin, and most people don't have that.
The people who say they're "useless at languages" are the ones who tell themselves that they're useless: ie., they can't be bothered to apply themselves.
I watched a half dozen dedicated soldiers apply themselves like crazy to the Russian language, and that didn't keep them from washing out. You might argue that they were being made to learn too quickly, but the course took a YEAR to get us up to the bare minimum level 2 proficiency. Arabic is at least the equal of Russian in difficulty. Positive thinking and happy thoughts aren't enough.
But, immersed in a country - as a US soldier in Iraq is
But they're not immersed, they're only exposed. "Immersion" is when you basically force people into a "sink-or-swim" situation. US soldiers in Iraq spend the majority of their time in the company of their own fellow soldiers, not walking around the streets of Baghdad trying to get a job, a meal, or an apartment.
you could very easily teach Arabic on a large scale to the officers at the very least
When are we going to teach them? At ROTC or OCS? And how do you know they're going to end up in Iraq(arabic) and not Afghanistan(pashtun)? Like I said before, Arabic isn't mexican spanish and there's a lot more to language proficiency than learnign to ask "how much for the beer" and "where's the bathroom". It takes the better part of a year to learn Arabic well enough for it to be useful.
and possibly to the infantry as well.
You've clearly never spent a lot of time with the infantry. Most of them are disqualified under the "anybody who managed to master a mother tongue" requirement. Some of them already barely speak english as their second language.
It's just a question of cost, but, expensive as good language teachers are, it would still only be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall cost of prosecuting this ludicrous war.
Actually, it's a question of resources, only ONE of which is money. They already don't have enough instructors. For Languages like pashto and uzbek, there exists no teaching materials at all, only a few obscure papers by linguists in the late 1800's. The resource that is lacking now is time. Time to find and train instructors, time to build the curriculum, time to teach the students.
As for motivation - I suspect that your average infantry grunt would not be hugely motivated to learn Arabic. But try this: "Making an effort in this class could very easily save your life tomorrow." I suspect that could make a big difference...
Man, you obviously never spent ANY time with the infantry! Every single bit of training for them is
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
this seems like the first obvious or direct benefit for us Arabs, a new technology that serves us, goood work, give somemore, arabize emacs.
Anyone feeling jealous!
Okay, that last bit was a funny. No offense anyone.
I've been massively underwhelmed at Babelfish's ability to understand foreign-language text and by ViaVoice's ability to understand speech.
Do not forget this is DARPA, they have nearly unlimited resources in both money and brains (dont tell the zombies)
the U.S. does nothing for a couple of years and then tries to throw a cheap technical fix at the problem.
This translator has most likely been in development since the idea of voice recognition, and is now good enough that they feel they can deploy it with better than dead success. (with Arabic!, a true feat, check other posts on the differences between the languages, and then try to apply that to an already complex program. I bet this thing could rip through any latin based language with the appropriate DARPAtalk(tm) package.)
Instead of doing the obvious thing--give soldiers training in Arabic and offer big bonuses for Arabic-speaking recruits--the U.S. does nothing for a couple of years and then tries to throw a cheap technical fix at the problem.
Few people want to be soldiers now. There is a hot war. I agree that having human translators like the old (original) human artillary computers would work quite well, and they could probably get recruits if the language recruits were guaranteed service in the US or EU or some place with less deadlyness. Training humans also takes a lot of time and money, probably not as much as building the machine, but you only need to build "one" machine and keep improving on it, vs retraining a human over and over [obviously].
For some half ass numbers for context, take the 22,000 translators necessary, say they know no Arabic, train them for 4 years at a good language school for ~160,000 tuition, multiply by 10 for the government pricing rule (1 person getting the goods takes 10 support people to get the goods to that person, this figure may be (and probably is) higher). 22,000 * 160,000 * 10 == 35 200 000 000. Yes, these are semi-arbitrary numbers, and not all translators would need the full training, etc, but it is still a large investment into something that will eventually retire, quit, turn, or die.
The real score is that this tool will be great for sucking up communications anywhere, anytime to check against patterns that are interesting to the government. This will be good and bad, but hopefully in time will end up in some robot that will help you do the dishes. Or it will ask you for your papers. Probably both.
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Given that and your experience, would you say that kicking out 37+ students because they're gay is a great strategic move?
No, I'd say it's fucking stupid, but I'm not in charge of military sexual orientation policy. I do, however, understand their position. The military doesn't want to be used as a platform for activism because it compromises it's primary purpose: to wage war. The military is a very disciplined institution. It forbids a lot of things among them walking around shouting "I'M A GAY SOLDIER!" Frankly, the real problem is people who can't just do their god damn job without telling everyone about their sex lives:
Christ almighty, since when is keeping your private life to yourself "living a double life"? Among my DLI classmates were three guys everyone knew were gay. Hell, two of them shared a room and constantly bickered like an old married couple! But nobody cared because that was entireley irrelevant to our common job as soldiers, and none of them turned in a signed "confession" of their homosexuality to the CO. Doing that and griping about the result is just dumb. Anyone who does that has to know that they're basically asking for a discharge. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy is about the best compromise the brass can come up with right now. I predict that'll change in the next 20 or so years, once the "stigma" of homosexuality starts to fade, and it'll be absorbed into the already existing rules forbidding overt expressions of sexuality while in uniform; but until then, there just too much socially conservative inetia to do that.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
For those who want more info on the polls see http://www.iraqanalysis.org/info/55. Note the first one by the UK's ministry of defence which shows that 65% of iraqis actually support attacks by insurgents on british troops. Also note the systematic bias in the IRI reports, which you can read about here.
on what to say to make the translater speak properly?
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Darpa Darpa, Muhamad Jihad.
James T Fallows is comparing apples and oranges. 1) this is not 1942. We don't have a huge pool of eager, patriotic draftees fresh off a decade of depression looking for purpose in their lives.
2) this is not 1942. The military has little leverage on college campuses in general, and is unlikely to find the professors teaching southwest asian languages willing to cooperate with them.
3) this is not 1942. We aren't concentrating on breaking coded military communications by a traditional army in a war with clealy defined front lines. We're trying to root out a loose confederation of miltant religious extremists living and operating within the countries we've already conquered. We need to be able to talk to the locals, not just listen in to the enemy's phone calls. Subsequently, we don't have just one language to deal with. The military needs not only Arabic, but Pashto, Dari, Azgari, Uzbek, Turkmen, Berberi, Aimaq, Baluchi, Basha Indonesian, Urdu, Turkic, and Persian Farsi linguists.
His attempt to compare A) the monumental task of finding qualified instructors for obscure languages, developing curriculum for the courses, and teaching these extremely difficult languages that (in some cases) don't even have an alphabet; and B) getting a bunch of people to learn, or finding people who already speak, a common and (relatively) widely known language like Japanese; well, the attmept is basically idiotic.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"English motherfucker! Do you speak it?"
Lets hope this doesn't turn out like the "The Hungarian Phrasebook sketch." "My hovercraft is full of eels," indeed. See http://www.serve.com/bonzai/monty/classics/TheHung arianPhrasebookSketch for details.
Hakk, derp derp Allah!
Durpa Durpa, Muhammad Jihad!
Hakka sherpa sherpa, a-backkhala!
Isn't torture the universal language?
What are you talking about, "what are you going to use?" The answer is; your gun. In Iraq, American policy is that a bullet is the universal language!
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.
Why not have the machine preprogrammed with a list of common phrases, ect. that you can select in english and it'll speak in a phrase in Arabic prechecked by a professional translator back at the factory and use the voice translater as a backup function for extreme/uncommon situations?
Demented But Determined.
You must think in French to steal one of those secret mind-controlled Mirages.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
ahahahahahaha
We would like to allie with your troops beep... beep... beep... beep... You want to do WHAT with our mothers?? you sick american pigs! WAR!!!
Do NOT goto this URL http://www.forthesims.com
I can speak to how hard this is. The Arabic course is actually 63 weeks, with an additional 4 more months at Goodfellow AFB, TX. I was a former Russian linguist. I say former linguist because I washed out of the course with 2/3 of the class (yes only a 1/3 ended up graduating). Learning a language isn't hard, but the pace they are trying to teach it to you at is. It's OK though, I got reclassied into a much cooler job and I'm much happier with it.
"Can you hear me now?"
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
So is the US government finally admitting they don't understand the people they're displacing and killing. If they could have admitted that in the first place maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.
I see this as being indicative of a much larger problem with American imperialism. The US has the biggest army and sends it out the most to fight wars. But the US also has one of least internationally informed populaces.
Language is life people. How can we expect to help Iraqis if we can't even communicate with them without interpreters. And to all those people who complain about interpreters screwing stuff up. I've seen it first person as I am bilingual. I've acted as an interpreter before and it's tough. After a couple of hours you just want everyone to shut up.
Interpreters and gadgets aren't the answer. The only answer is daily cultural and language training for the troops stationed in Iraq. But they're burdened enough as it is. Maybe they should just leave and let the Iraqis figure it out?
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
and many others, PLEASE try http://www.pimsleur.com/ language-training. . .
The diff is night||day. . .
This works by training one's brain the way babies learn the bits of language: individual-sounds, sylables, and associating meaning with sound-forms in one's automatic words brain/mind.
Not the industrial-era gigo+roteLearning "training" that is usual in language-"education".
IPTables enhancement Fail2Ban bans cracker-login's
We will bury you
The fact that our most highly trained military linguists often don't have enough discipline to keep their sex life to themselves reflects on the quality of those who are charged with selecting and training them. The military is rotten from the top down. Perhaps you are not, but the system you are sworn to is.
"I steal your oil"
"I crush your chest after torture"
enuf sed.
"Arabic is at least the equal of Russian in difficulty."
I'd wager it's a lot more difficult, actually, since russian is indoeuropean, and arabic is not.
You're totally right, though. People just don't grasp how difficult learning languages is. If they did, those "teach yourself russian in 20 easy lessons" courses wouldn't sell...
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.