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IBM Strives For 'Superhuman' Speech Tech
robyn217 writes "IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology today that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs. One of the projects perpetually monitors Arabic television stations, dynamically transcribing and translating any words spoken into English subtitles. Videos can then be viewed via a web browser, with all transcriptions indexed and searchable."
They really do it on the fly? You mean, [on the surface of] [a particular] [insect of a Musca domestica species]?
I have read a lot of auto-translated documents and it is always a good laughter in terms of "crapslation cabaret". So far, there is no technology that could auto-translate a text document succesfully. The "80% success" is a myth - they just count how many words were found in the vocabulary, not how many of them were put into a good context. A "fly" translated as an insect would be accounted as a success!
Even if you are not a bot but a human being with some knowledge of the other language and culture, it's very easy to involuntary offend someone or just to make a ridiculous faux-pas. Polish and Czech languages, for example, are very much alike and use common roots for many words, but because of the way both languages evolved, some neutral terms on one side of the border have become offensive on the other side. Czechs evolved an euphemism for sexual intercourse based on the verb "to look for". Poles still use this word when they look for something, which leads to constant crapslation cabaret gags when a Polish tourist appears in a Czech town "looking for a parking lot". Now, auto-translate this...
It is as closer to English as any other language. In general, European languages have the same basics as English (such as "the") and are fairly easy to learn and translate. Right now I live in Japan, where the language and its underlying way of thinking basically run in the reverse direction of English. To translate, you are essentially running the whole thing backwards. Worse yet, the fundamental parts of the language are quite different. For example, Japanese does not have articles or prepositions, though it has post-positions that roughly correspond. However, there are fewer of them, so they have "lots of meanings" when translated into English. Translation can be a "#$#, even for a human who understands both languages very well (which is why anime comes off so corny sometimes). There are countless times where there is just no simple way to express a thought in one language that is trivial in the other.