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Real-Time Computer-Based Translation in Iraq
[TheBORG] writes "The U.S. military has been testing software on laptops that translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English to have conversations with Iraqis without the need to have a Arabic linguist on hand. 'This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.'" (See this related story from last year about this daunting machine-translation task.)
Arabic is even worse than most human languages for being contextual and ambiguous. It's superb for writing poetry but betting lives on translating it automatically?
Reminds me of experiment I read about in old computer book... Program was created to translate from English to Russian and back. As a test, a phrase "Time flies like arrow" was translated to Russian and then back to English. It came back as "There are types of flies, called 'Time Flies' that enjoy eating arrows.
You can probably have unbelievably simple conversations, like
"Do you want to kill me?" "No."
And for anything approximating a normal conversation, it's utterly fucking useless. Also, for the times when you actually need a very urgent, very good understanding of the language to prevent a lot of trouble, I bet it's beyond worthless.
At present, and for the forseeable future, there's no adequate substitute for humans that speak the language. I realize we throw Arabic speakers out of the military because they're gay and all, but maybe we could make an exception because their skills are necessary at present. No computer translation system is adequate for usage in a live military operation.
Oh, and IACL (I am A Computational Linguist).
As someone who has studied translation (Japanese/English) at the University level, I can tell you that interpreting in real-time in a heavily context-sensitive language like Japanese or Arabic is an incredible challenge for even people who have spoken both languages for -decades-. When tiny grammatical changes can affect the entire meaning of a sentence, and voice recognition is by no means perfect, and homonyms come into play, the entire process is incredibly difficult. On a -personal- level, as someone who studies languages and desires a career in either teaching or translation, I'm worried not so much that it's replacing the human element, but that people believe it can be used without human intervention. The difficulty of interpretation and translation (this would be the former, for the record) is related to the distance, in linguistic construction, between the two languages, and few languages are further apart than English and Arabic. The increases in accuracy of machine translation also grow logarithmically; the more development that comes out of it, the less benefit you get. What I do believe we should be doing is investing money in both language education AND language technology. I also have a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth regarding the fact that the U.S. military is discharging qualified linguists that happen to be homosexual, but then I say that as a homosexual language student that wanted to join the military when I graduated. Now I'm looking to move to Canada.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
will it fit in my ear and does it come with chips?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Well now that was the poorest troll I've seen in a long time.
My job wasn't to translate. I produced translated websites and printed documents. The company I worked for was sort of a translation broker. We worked with in country translators across the globe. People who have never worked in the industry seem to think it should be simple - it isn't. Consider some of the complications:
1. Regional dialects - i.e. Canadian French is not identical to what is spoken in France. Same with English in the US vs. UK.
2. Language specific to a certain domain, such as medical, technical or legal.
3. Slang meanings
4. Humor/sarcasm
5. Analogies and metaphors
Consider a reference to Bible parable (say Noah and the Ark) sure most people in the US would understand it - but would you understand the relevance of a reference to a parable from the Koran?
We frequently had professional translators arguing amongst themselves as to the proper wording to use.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I can't but wonder if it wouldn't be more effective to have a central call center for arabic/english translators for the soldiers to call when they to facilitate communication. Perhaps they could install a videophone system to provide the visuals. How feasible is this?
That way you keep the translators out of harm's way, making them easier to retain/hire.
the comic value of poor translation software may serve as a great ice break between the locals and the troops.
This sig is false.
On a more serious sidenote, it is indeed interesting to know that the "Arabic numerals" are actually called "Indian numerals" in Arab countries.
Arabic text usually uses Hindi numerals. Regardless of the numerals used, numbers in Arabic read from left to right.
Agreed 100%. I think that using technology to translate could be pyschologically, pretty bad. We all know that iraqis and americans are from different countries, but we also know quite a few iraqis can get by in english, as its such a common language. You already have a situation where an arabic guy is talking to some (probably) white guy, whose in uniform and holding a gun. Then you have the situation that he obviously doesnt speak any of your language, now we have a situation where he finds your language so weird and difficult to learn that he resorts to using technology instead. Iraqis arent stupid, they know that its possible to learn a foreign language, and lets remember that its the americans that have come to iraq, not the other way around. I reckon this is just going to cause resentment. It also changes the soldiers view of the iraqi. "these people speak so weirdly I need a laptop to communicate" etc (subconciously obviously).
To be honest, if your serious about 'winning hearts and minds' and determined enough to sacrifice X thousand soldiers in a protracted ground war on foreign soil, at least some small percentage of the budget needs to go towards language and culture lessons for that country.
I can see how some logistics staff in washington might think this is the solution, if there is such a thing as a'military psychologist' I'd like to hear their views.
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Now, being generous while categorizing those results gives:
Complete Success = 2 out of 9 = 22% (Spanish and Chinese)
Almost successfull = 1 out of 9 = 11% (Japanese)
Catastrophic failures = 3 out of 9 = 33% (Portuguese, Italian and Korean)
Serious failures = 3 out of 9 = 33% (French, German and Arabic)
How they get to sell software which fails more than half the times at translating such a simple sentence is truly beyond me...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Eight million Arab-Americans, living inside the United States, and no Arabic translators?
I'll tell you why, as an Arab-American.
I filled in the application on line for a linguist job, and system administration jobs, just two weeks before 9/11. Before, not after, on the US Army's website, on the CIA's website, and on the NSA's website. Well, three week, after 9/11, I went to the Army unit in town, to check with open heart to serve my country.
Five hours of the worst humiliation that you can ever imagine, including, but not limited to, insults (sand niger, camel shit-face, desert monkey, etc), slaps, rough elbows, bushes, and finally a gun drawn to my face, with fire-angry looks, telling me that this better be the last time I show my stinking face in any "respected Christian army barracks". That was at the recruitment center in Minneapolis, MN, in the presence of six soldiers, and two officers.
Six months later, On my first flight visiting my retired uncle in Florida, who worked at the Mayo clinic for 10 years, then for the University of Minnesota for 20 more years (at that time, I was a Unix/Sun Junior system administrator at AT&T), my Linux laptop was confiscated from me at the airport, because it is running a "hackers OS", never seen it again since, my clothes was trashed in front of hundreds of people, including the security guard holding my underwear infront of a crowd, saying that it smells like a "shitty arab", my cell phone was smashed to uncover the "hidden explosives". Then finally I was put under detention for a day. Then I was let go, because simply my uncle called to see what caused me to miss my flight, he knew about the situtation. He called one of his regular patients, who was a 30+ years member of the State Congress, who made his request to the "Airport Manager" to stop his "personal patriotism", and let me go. I guess I am one of the lucky ones to survive NOT ending in Guantanamo, or a much worse place.
Let's not talk about the constant harrasment at my previous job as a sys admin. let's ignore the ex-neighbors trashy attitude towards me and my wife. Let's bypass the way I left Minnesota, to Wisconsin, just to get away from this constant fake smile, that show sharp angry teeth within only a few minutes of conduct. Let's put aside also that I was not able to find a job in IT (I am a RHCT and a CCNA) for over a year, just because of my Arabic Muslim name, inside America, my own country.
Go ahead, laugh, say your insults, do your thing, feel good trashing Arabic and Muslims. You are not impressing me at all.
Arabic translators? sure. Just go to http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en. Or, go to http://www.google.com/intl/ar/ , then click on translate. But do not knock on my door at any time soon.
The sentence you chose is vulnerable to a lot of factors that make translation difficult. It contains a contraction, for one thing. Worse, it contains a pronoun, so all at once it's subject to problems among languages with gendered pronouns versus those without -- that's why the gender gets thrown away in the German, Italian, Portuguese, and French versions. It also contains a past participle predicate, which is another construction that has analogues in many languages but different actual meanings (hence the Japanese version).
All the same, it does pinpoint how freakin' amazingly awful Babelfish Korean is. Even Japanese is better.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.