Copier Auto-Translates Japanese to English

StCredZero writes "Wild. Fuji has created a photocopier that automatically translates documents from Japanese to English. That's pretty nuts. Apparently, the copier can figure out what sections are text, OCR the text, send it to a translation engine, and put the english back into place."

Comments

It's impossible...

[wanderingknight]

...for a machine, under the current paradigms (that is, no true artificial intelligence) to properly translate something. Translation is not an exact science, and you can't expect to get a decent translation by just having a word-per-word approach. Heck, not even a sentence-per-sentence or paragraph-per-paragraph approach would ever be enough. Translation requires deep social knowledge--you need to know what you are translating, from whom you are translating, for whom you are translating... that is, you need to enclose your translation in a sociological context. No machine can ever wish to do that without artificial intelligence. It's hard enough as it is to get a human being to understand that word-per-word translation is stupid--imagine telling that to your CPU core.

Disclaimer: I'm a translation student myself ;)

Re:Manga and Anime

[dancingmad]

Imagine if you upload anime to YouTube, and it automatically includes an English subtitle.

Without the kanji, since a large number of Japanese words are homophones, I can't see this being practical in the near future. Text is different - with the kanji, it's not terribly difficult to look up the correct word and with kana grammar beside it, the task gets much easier. I can't see a machine understand a conversation in context, however.