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).

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...