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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.