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.)

Comments

Big worry

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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?

Re:Big worry

[StikyPad]

What about a stressed out, crying arabic speaker that has just had his family shot and/or blown up?

Not to mention a panicked, confused english speaker who just had his leg blown off by an IED.

Reminds me of old experiment

[Ruvim]

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.

I bet it doesn't work too well.

[Reality Master 201]

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).

The process of translation

[demondawn]

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.

Re:May I be the first to say

[snuf23]

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.

Re:Computer: AL YOUR QAEDA ARE BELONG TO US

[rolfwind]

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.

An example

[rbarreira]

Just to show you guys how good automatic translation is, here is the simplest sentence I've found so far which is translated very badly by google translation (systran, also used in altavista's babelfish):

• "She's dead!" into Portuguese gives "Está inoperante!", into english again gives "It is inoperative!".
• "She's dead!" into Italian gives "È guasto!", into english again gives "It is out of order!".
• "She's dead!" into French gives "Elle est morte !", into english again gives "It died!".
• "She's dead!" into Spanish gives "Ella es muerta!", into english again gives "She is dead!".
• "She's dead!" into German gives "Sie ist tot!", into english again gives "It is dead!".
• "She's dead!" into Arabic gives (something I can't paste here), into english again gives "Are dead!".
• "She's dead!" into Japanese gives (something I can't paste here), into english again gives "She has died!".
• "She's dead!" into Korean gives (something I can't paste here), into english again gives "Her it dies! where".
• "She's dead!" into Chinese gives (something I can't paste here), into english again gives "She's dead!".

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...