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'Tower of Babel' Translator Under Development
monopole writes "The BBC is reporting on a bilingual translator under development by Carnegie Mellon University which senses sub-vocalized speech, recognizes it, translates it and then synthesizes the translation. The overall effect would be to dub the speech of the speaker."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
g nition
Subvocalization is basically micro-movements of the muscles associated with speech. The Wikipedia article mostly focuses on reading & subvocalization, so I wonder, do you have to be trained to do it consciously?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_speech_reco
This wikipedia article says that recognition is hard.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sorry to say, English is not as unusual as you would like to believe. (I am a linguist.)
In many ways, English is quite simple. For example, our word order is very straightforward. I work with a language were the following is a normal sentence: "This is city New called York here." (This city here is called New York.) In fact, almost every permutation of those words would be valid without a change in the basic meaning (as long as "is" is the second word). This is a so-called non-configurational language. Parsing English is easy by comparison.
I work with another language were there is a slight stress difference between the sentences "That might be true" and "He's honestly picking his butt." The words "soup" and "shit" are differentiated by a 40-50% increase in the length of the last vowel. There is one word for both "blue" and "green", and another word for "yellow", "orange", and "brown".
As to the likelihood of this project succeeding anytime soon: Languages are often not directly translatable into each other. One language I work with has an entire part of speech I cannot adequately translate into English. I have to wave my hands and point to convey the same information in English.
I can't believe nobody's posted this yet. This would be *really* useful as a *mono*-lingual translator! Build one of these into every cell phone, and suddenly I don't have to hear your inane conversation just because you happen to be sitting next to me in the plane.
This should be *much* easier to do that the version that actually translates, and it would add nearly as much to quality of life of the user and everyone else in his environs.
The point is not in the height of the tower. It's the symbolism that man was defying God and trying to get "there" by his own means.
You can't fully understand what someone's saying unless you understand their cultural context, and how it differs from your own.
For example, what's the difference in (UK) English between: "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less"? In US English they're used interchangably, but in UK English they're opposites. There are many such words or phrases in the English language alone where the precise word chosen (or connotations of a word) totally changes the meaning of the entire phrase, even reversing it's meaning.
Another example would be a simple phrase in US English like "he was pissed"? US meaning is "he was angry". In UK English it means "he was drunk", and a word-for-word translation into greek it would be meaningless (the equivalent idiom in Greek would be something like "he took it on the skull").
Seriously - if you ever want to understand the drawback to automatic translation, try getting two Greek friends to talk colloquially to you, but translating each individual word into English - it's completely unintelligible.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself