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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."
They've been using this for years to translate instruction manuals.
StCredZero "writes wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. With respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, to send that to the translation engine, and in the place English". You reset, or can grasp.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
It translates to Engrish?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Hey, I just got one of these and all it'll print is "All your base are belong to us."....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
[Reading from his book, "Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler," translated to Japanese and back again]
Jimmy: I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo...
[pauses while turning page]
Jimmy: dung.
...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
So how bad are we talking? Vista Speech Recognition bad or Zero Wing bad?
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
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.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
They probably used it to translate the instruction manual into Engrish.
Most of the stuff on
They did something like this with a Japanese car manual a long time ago; it ended up something like: "If a passenger of foot should obstacle your passage, tootle the horn. Tootle him melodiously at first, but if he continues obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor."
Our those which achieve the main thing of the ether of title in order to know never clearly that remnant because of the remainder which it should find!
Since I could never have created the above err, prose, myself, I typed the following answer into babelfish and translated it into Japanese, and for good measure, back into English.
Clearly that remains for those of us who have achieved the title Ether Lord to know, and for the rest never to find out!
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Circumcision is child abuse.
Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement.
Yeah, 'cause researchers have long promised us that AI will reach us in 10 years. <sarcasm>
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech? My experience has primarily been with Japanese and English, and I'll tell you right now that it can be nightmarish.
Sentence fragments are the worst part. Japanese has a completely different word order from English. All modifiers (including phrases and clauses) come before the word they modify, and the language has a Subject-Object-Verb order. "I just saw the man who stole my friend's watch last Tuesday" becomes "Just I Last Tuesday friend's watch stole man saw." Now try translating that from Japanese to English when the sentence is cut in half.
Worse, the language has very different levels of allowed vagueness. "Complete" sentences in Japanese can contain just a descriptor or an action without any specification of who did/was what. Conversely, translating "3 of them" in English to Japanese is hard because you have to know "3 of what?" to know what counting suffix to use.
Another problem is that many very different words sound exactly the same when conjugated to the gerund or perfective forms. English has a number of homonyms, but there are MANY more opportunities for mix-ups if you don't have access to kanji to tell the semantic meaning apart because Japanese has a much more limited range of phonemes. For example, take "katte" which is the gerund form of the verbs "kau" (buy), "kau" (keep/raise), "karu" (cut), "karu" (spur on), and "katsu" (win). That's 5 completely different verbs that conjugate to the same sound. If they're written phonetically or your going from speech, then you have to be able to understand the meaning behind the words to translate. (Did I mention earlier that you may not have an explicit subject and object to go off of?)
Then you get into issues of translating things like politeness levels, different ways of addressing people, and other concepts that don't translate well into English or concepts like singular vs. plural that are dropped in going to Japanese. Let's not even consider puns and poetry!
These are not trivial issues. An automatic translator would need to somehow be able to conceptualize what a person is trying to speak about, which would require understanding the story being told and an ability to predict where they are going with it. This will require strong AI.
Accurate and intelligible translation is an art -- not a science -- because it requires an intuitive and empathetic ability to understand the mind of the speaker well enough to map their thoughts into a different method of expression.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What is wild is that anyone with half a working braincell would use a photocopier in an office where a copy of every document is sent to an uncontrolled 3rd party for translation.
Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..
(not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).
So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.
Insert
Ooh, I hope not. If it does, then it means that it's got a real prediliction towards anime. That could produce some interesting translations, such as...
Dear Sir,
Your opponent is me! With regard to your memo dated 14th inst., I'll never forgive you, vampire bastard! Super ultra science business meeting, engage!
Noooooooooooooooo!
Yours faithfully,
Bob Morton
Chief Gundam Officer
Obviously the translator was all at sea.
Pining for the fjords
That's the fun part of these automatic translators - put in perfectly good English, translate to a foreign language, and translate back to English. Good fun for a rainy afternoon.
"Today is under construction... please do not be alarmed by the construction men hanging themselves from outside your balcony. We will take them down tomorrow..."
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads