'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."

Comments

The science behind it is fascinating

[chowdy]

The Tower of Babel Translator is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Tower of Babel Translator in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Tower of Babel Translator.

Other Languages

[Longfinger]

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

Re:Other Languages

[kfg]

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

Re:Other Languages

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Other Languages

[JuzzFunky]

Second Language? You might not even have to larn a first language! Just grunt. Mm.

Re:Other Languages

[brian.glanz]

There are practical advantages in problem solving which have been tied to the language used in mental formulation, for example the development of what is metaphorically called "logical circuitry" has been shown to diverge between native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers.

My expectation is that spoken language will eventually go the way of handwriting: creature comfort, dying art, what once defined the best of us but becomes in many cases an indulgent inefficiency. How?

Anybody who dares to at this point, has realized they can jam wires into the human brain and let it learn to control machines on the other end. It's already beyond that in fact, with embedded communication devices being the next step, stepping shoe now currently in air: you'll see in a few days in Nature how real the "Neurochip" already is.

People should stop pretending this is about helping paraplegics by playing Space Invaders or moving a cursor with mind control, or that we're only trying to help brain injury, stroke, or paralysis patients. This is about construction workers with better than human strength in their better than human limbs. We drive vehicles through obstacles on land at 10 times the speed human beings can run, and we fly vehicles at 800 times the speed we can biologically move ourselves. We are mentally capable of managing bodily abilities far beyond those with which we are born.

This is not only about helping the disabled, and it's not only about incredible speeds or strengths. It's also about perfectly able people who would rather control personal electronics with their thoughts than search for or decipher other remote control electronics. Personal electronics are going to be a lot more personal, too; these people will eventually prefer to have personal electronics embedded in their bodies and networked with their minds.

Don't worry about losing human language: we will only lose it when we'll be better off for it, when we communicate and think better without it. The translator here, with IBM and elsewhere is of course more narrowly focused, but with this we are converging on technological telepathy and obsoleting human language.

Human logic and good intentions have come at it from a more traditional, less technological direction, giving us Esperanto, Loglan, Lojban, etc. You've probably heard of only one of these, which you probably laughed at somebody for being Geek enough to know any of. Most of them have been great ideas and well executed, but despite inherent gains in efficiency or intellectual force they are nowhere near the markets and their returns depend on mass adoption. Technology is different, it's tied directly to markets and to private profiteering with immediate amplification of wealth among the wealthy. Human beings are not going to create a better enough language, soon enough, before we create a technology which in itself superior to all human language. BG

subvocalization

[TubeSteak]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

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_recog nition

This wikipedia article says that recognition is hard.

Re:subvocalization

[Frogbert]

Well luckily I've changed the article, so now sub vocal recognition is easy

Remind me to turn this off at work

[Joebert]

Electrodes are attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as the person silently mouths words and phrases.

It's only a matter of time before this thing gets me fired.

Question of the Millenium

[richdun]

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.

Re:Question of the Millenium

[AhtirTano]

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.

Oh great...

[revlayle]

the last time i heard of people constructing a Tower of Babel, the whole world got toally pwned and no one could understand each other. well, not much different than it is now is it.

/not religious

Re:Oh great...

[aussie_a]

Apparently that happened about 2,000 years after the Earth was first formed. Considering that happened 4.57 billion years ago I find it appalling that only now are they attempting to translate the numerous languages that resulted from the Tower of Babel travesty. I mean, how lazy can you get? What have they been doing all this time?

Ain't Going to Happen

[eean]

Don't worry, they've been working on machine translation since the 60s and fully automatic translation still sucks. Speech to text isn't so great either.

Language is complicated!