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'Tower of Babel' Translator Under Development

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-did-he-say dept.

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."

9 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Other Languages by Longfinger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If this technology gets good enough, none of us would ever need to learn a second language. That would be a bad thing, right?

    1. Re:Other Languages by kfg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Language is not composed of words. It is composed of idiomatic phrases (idiomatic phrases do not mean what the words mean) only understandable in context. True automatic translation is not possible.

      As an example, I was once called upon to translate the simple advertising slogan "Si Misura" from Italian to English. This had already been translated as "Made to Measure."

      Quick, without thinking, tell me what the product was?

      If you're a native English speaker you probably think of a suit or dress. Maybe a kitchen cabinet. Some tool with human ergonomic requirements.

      The product was a liquid chemical compound, so I translated it into the correct English idiom for such; "Custom Blended."

      And with that simple example we haven't even touched on issues of syntax yet; or more complicated issues of social usage (say formal vs. informal forms).

      KFG

    2. Re:Other Languages by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But doesn't the language itself play a part in the culture? Almost any language you look at there are bound to be words that don't translate well because the object or action or emotion in question is so innately bound to the culture that they made a word for it, but to other cultures the concept isn't all that common so they never made a word for it.

      Also, even translation by the best humans still destroys a lot of the subtlety and beauty in a language. It's a best a piecemeal game. Hell, most novels/tv shows are not even translated literally, some artistic liberty is usually taken to make the work "flow" in the language it is being translated into. Translation is great for contracts or technical documents, but if you really want to understand a culture then you need to learn its language.

      --
      Monstar L
    3. Re:Other Languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      You miss the point. There is no single translation of logos, "word" is the most basic translation, but often, you will need to translate it as "reasoning" or "argument" to make the translation sound correct in English.

      Having said that, I think even without true AI, the context can be guessed at, maybe from a frequency database (especially for popular idioms), with a reasonable accuracy.

      And, finally, "the WORD" would be "ho logos", not just "logos" (if you were trying to invoke the Word that has become Flesh).

  2. Question of the Millenium by richdun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So let's say this works - which language will we use as a primary one now that it doesn't matter, since everyone can understand everyone else easily?

    Anyone who has studied languages knows (not "no"s or "nose") that English absolutely sucks (as in is bad, not as in pulls air into itself), but we use it widely (as in across a large range of people and places, not as in having a large girth) in large part (as in a significant reason, not as in being a big piece of something) due to the primary sources of finance and technology being in English-speaking countries (not literally the countries, but their people).

    I like the idea, and see the huge, positive social impact it could have, but I feel sorry for the guy/gal responsible for it to test its ability to translate into/out of English.

    1. Re:Question of the Millenium by awol · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I am a native English speaker (well Australian anyway). Members of my familiy have taught ESL (English as a Second Language) to adults and children. Friends of mine are speech therapists. For the last 15 years I have been doing business with people who have English as their second language.

      English is trivial to learn well enough to communicate. The reason? You only really need to learn vocabulary. All the points raised previously about the difficulty of automatic translation are kind of true but, for English at least (and probably Spanish), irrelevant. This is because these languages are the most accepting of inappropriate use. Actually from a linguistic perspective there is a lot of variation that can at least provide syntactic correctness and hence still convey meaning. There is very little (any?) positional context in English, ie where the meaning of a word or phrase changes according to its position in the stream. Indeed even where this might be the case it is really only in quite sophisticated use in which these things exist and that can be ruled out when you are communicating with an identified non-speaker. Also most of the speakers of English language are most accepting of inappropriate use.

      Further the language positively rewards inappropriate use by the nature of English art (poetry, prose, even comedy) where so much of the beauty of are is derived from pushing the edge of meaning by interesting context. It is true that many languages are the same but perhaps none so much as English (perhaps with the exception of Arabic where it seems to me [I am not a linguist] that metaphor has a large role in even basic speech).

      Having lived in London for 10 years, I regularly see non-native english speakers from completely different language families (Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Germanic, Asian, Slavic) speaking to each other in English (with varying levels of brokenness) because it is easy for them to find "common" ground to refine the synonyms they are using, even those that they do not all understand. (Sure they are in London, but even at conferences outside the UK the same is true). Part of this is because of the English as Lingua Franca but part of that is because English (as a language) is so tolerant of bad grammar. It is rare for bad grammar to fundamentally alter the meaning of a dialogue. It is possible and it is easy for confusion to arise, but then so too is it easy to clarify the actual meaning intended.

      Many of the "this is impossible" comments from previous posters seem to assume that the translation described is context free. Why should it be so? The translator can just as easily be fed context about environment as well as the surrounding language of the segment being actively processed. Such information would help the translation.

      So automatic translation can work (even badly) and provide a good basis for an iterative approach to conveying meaning between parties that have no common language. At a basic level even if it is just "identifiers" (nouns), "doing words" (verbs) and "describing words" (adjectives, or adverbs) it will facillitate _communication_.

      --
      "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
    2. Re:Question of the Millenium by AhtirTano · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It isn't Mandarin, which I happen to be studying at the moment, since it the tone changes the meaning of individual words, not whole sentences.

      The change in stress changes one word from a modal meaning "remote possibility" to a compound verb meaning "pick the butt". The adverb "honestly" and the verb "be true" are homophonous, and word order doesn't matter very much; thus, the ambiguity. This language is O'odham. The other language, the one that lets you split "compound words" is Serrano. Both are Uto-Aztecan languages spoken in the American southwest.

  3. Simulated telepathy. by EnsilZah · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I find that alot of my thought process is subvocalized.
    I was wondering how hard it would be to translate that into audible words and transmit them at a volume relative to distance from the receiver.
    Then you could have a social experiment where a group of people live together for a period of time while equipped with these transceivers.

  4. Communication != understanding by schwieter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "The Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."