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IBM Smartphone Software Translates 11 Languages
coondoggie writes to mention that IBM researchers have an internal smartphone software project that is capable of translating text between English and 11 other languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic). There are no concrete plans to release this as a public product, but IBM certainly isn't shutting out that possibility. "Hosted as an internal IBM service since August 2008, n.Fluent offers a secure real-time translation tool that translates text in web pages, electronic documents, same-time instant message chats, and provides a BlackBerry mobile translation application. According to IBM, the software was developed from an internal IBM crowd-sourcing project where Big Blue's nearly 400,000 employees in more than 170 countries submit, update and continuously refine word translations. Every time it's used, n.Fluent 'learns' and improves its translation engine. To date, the tool has been used by IBMers to translate more than 40 million words, IBM stated."
I thought I had heard of some project somewheres on the interwebs that used a method similar to this
Wow! I'm afraid this is a very commodious.
(forgive my terrible Japanese)
wow Big Blue actually does things?
...said the guy trying to get a first post on Slashdot.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to think how many hours processing each change request, in quadrupilate before the system learnt anything.
I can finally read that Japanese Slashdot?
I've always wondered what crazy stuff goes on over there, I mean they are on the CUTTING EDGE.
the german phrase "Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale" was correctly translated as: "My hoovercraft is full of eels" However the Hungarian translation was completely wrong
Dear Aunt...
J' hope for how that functions well!
If you give one of these phones to your girlfriend / wife, will it help you decode her rants into a language men can understand?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I'm a little confused about how this thing learns. A necessary component of learning is feedback, and I don't understand how this software will get any feedback correcting it when it makes some kind of translation mistake. Sure, the user could sit there correcting the output, but not only is that time-consuming, but also doesn't account for errors in translating TO the target language.
I also suspect it must be some kind of cloud-based tool; one user's copy of n.Fluent improving itself wouldn't help anyone else all that much... And if it it isn't, it should be! Though that opens another can of worms -- what do you do about conflicting feedback?
http://www.tenjou.net/
Nonetheless, he failed to identify IBM as the inventor of the precursor to the Universal Translator.
Still, he accurately predicted many techologies: communicator (i. e., cell phone), phasors (i. e., laser cannon, for which the Pentagon has already designated a prime contracror to build the device), and warp drive (hyperdrive, which the Pentagon is now attempting to build).
what's the difference between the first italian and the second italian?
According to IBM's market research, there's no benefit in publishing the tool at all. I think there is a world market for maybe five translators", said IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson recently at a press conference.
So basically, the fine print on one of their service contracts.
When they presented the project to IBM's top management, a going-public was sadly rejected. I think there is a world market for maybe five translators", IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson said, justifying the decision.
The ultimate test for machine translation system is whether it can do roundtrip translations without information loss or distortion of meaning. When I was in school somebody had carved "Borra mig i bjornen - Drill me in the bear - Drilla mig pa baret" in the desk. It's quite funny if you're a teenager and speak Swedish.
The spirit is will but the flesh is weak.
Other systems in the past has translated this English idiom into all sorts of laughable text but my favorite is
The vodka is tempting, but the meat's a bit suspect
There are many other famously wrong translations of idioms Admittedly, idioms are difficult to translate, but its not like the users will understand this or care. They just want a reasonable translation so they don't end up looking like an idiot to the cute foreign girl they are trying to bed.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
HIja' 'ach ta'taH 'oH ta' tlhIngan
Machine translation courtesy of http://www.mrklingon.org/.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If the software is calling a web service that performs the translation, then on the smartphone the software is trivial--a simple client that gets some user input, sends it to the internet, and receives translated text back. If this is the case, then there's no point in calling it "smartphone software", the brains are all on a server somewhere. And that server software deserves to be compared apples-to-apples to other online translation services like say... Babel Fish, to determine how worthy it is. Adding the "smartphone software" bit seems like a marketing ploy.
Chinese, really? It translates things into a non-existent language? Maybe it can translate into Indian some day too.
Happy it is that I am to be informed of you that using translating device I slashdot egg war for screen.
Last usable time once again for perfect reading!
If I read this properly this will be a web app, which will be nice for times when you have a data connection, but I have to wonder if you always will have that, the majority of the times when you need to use this.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
My smartphone already does this - it's called google translate, and was a huge boon while I was overseas last month.
They are most likely referring to Standard Chinese (also called Standard Mandarin), which is used in all government communications.
like this example of Hungarian to English translation.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
When they couple it with spoken word recognition
i think ibm have some catching up to do! ;) - google translate does a lot more languages than that (51 in total) - in fact i'm kinda surprised google have not built it into their chromium-os or the android platform (erm, i dunno - maybe they have - it's difficult to keep up with it all)
and, to top it all, google recently added the ability to view romanisations of characters such as chinese han, and input transliteration of phonetics for hindi, arabic and persian.
to my technical yet non-linguistically educated mind (i'm english by birth, so - thanks mostly to our poor education system, at least when it comes to languages - i only read, write and speak one language, and to be honest it's somewhat debatable how well us english folk are at our own language, although at least we don't speak americanese [/me ducks and runs] - although it's creeping into the common vernacular more and more thanks to the telly - 'though i digress somewhat), it'd be interesting to see how the technology that powers google's translate differs from that which powers ibm's n.fluent - to my mind the end result looks similar, so i wonder how much these kinds of technologies differ and/or how much they have in common?
idioms?
But an excellent translation of:
"Finally made it to the middle class? So sorry, we are shutting down your shop and relocating your services to a less expensive country with even less paid drones. We're the new IBM... we don't make computers, operating systems. We just make it easier to manage slavery."
This is my sig.
Its really useful software ibm put in mobile . its really help who want to learn other language and who travel around the world .awesome innovation for the users of mobile.
Force Factor
Yep, it can translate from English to Italian, AND Italian! And I thought Italian was one language, but apparently you get to count it as two!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Accurate machine translation will never be achieved without the invention of human level AI. Translating from one language to another (Especially significantly different ones) requires full understanding of the contents of the text. It never could be and never will be achievable through word/phrase substitution.
Language itself is full of ambiguities. Firstly, different languages have different ambiguities, choosing to encode different bits of information. Secondly, there are different usages of different phrases depending on context and often the only way to disambiguate the different usages is knowing the context by knowing the meaning of what is being said.
In addition to this the grammatical forms of any two languages don't necessarily match up. Often translating them can mean not just rearranging the one sentence, but even rearranging the parts of multiple sentences to form a cohesive whole in a different language. This requires thinking about the meaning being conveyed.
As well as all that there's no one-to-one mapping between the meanings of words in different languages. The same word in different languages can have very different connotations. There are also words and concepts in different languages which just don't have a clear equivalent in other languages. These are generally culturally specific terms. A good translator has to be actively aware of the meaning and intention of the phrase being used.
Finally you have puns and jokes based on the connotations associated with a particular phrase which are more often than not completely untranslatable between different languages.
idiots?
(NB: Not slagging, seriously asking.)
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Anyone who is bilingual will probably agree that machine translation is awful. It may be sometimes helpful to translate something into your native language if you don't understand something your receive, but it will only give you a rough idea. I have had coworkers actually send out machine translator output to customers.
but apparently you get to count it as two!
Well they talk twice as much as the others. They deserve to be counted twice.
I can't fathom that IBM wants to get into the Smart Phone business, being that they sold their ThinkPad business to Lenovo.
However, selling this to Nokia, RIM, or whoever. Now that would make some sense.
I would be a shame to see something like this die in their research labs.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I have seen some amazing, absolutely amazing things made by IBM and got wasted by "mainframe like" marketing.
One of recent examples is XL Compiler stuff, last time I checked, some mainframe reseller was trying to sell it for $600 with horribly designed (front page!) page. Until PowerPC developers on Mac could trial it, damn Apple switched to Intel :) I use it as good example why that sad decision to switch to Intel was right thing.
I have seen MPEG4 decoder/player written in Java, in JVM 1.1 ages. Imagine what would happen if a company other than IBM did it. Funny enough, it still exists in Alphaworks site and it uses _less_ CPU than Adobe Flash :)
Their "Via Voice", coming free with OS/2 4.0 was already amazing, right before it got totally wasted, some clever company bought the engine rights, mixed with another engine and still does extremely well with "naturally speaking".
I think Nuance (owner of T9) would do great job marketing this technology. It is their line of business.
Hardware vendor like Nokia or RIM would imprison into their devices ROM, they aren't really better than IBM for such purposes. I am a Nokia owner and I see some real pathetic stuff going on. Apple is out of question even.
It will weight a 800 pounds and have service where ever it bloody well pleases to have service.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I used the tool to translate a common Korean phrase that means "How's the weather today?" The n.Fluent English translation was "The fine weather today?" Since it allows you to "suggest" and submit a different translation, I did so. An hour later, I tried the same phrase, got the same response as before, and resubmitted the correct translation. An hour after that, I repeated the process, with the same results. Maybe it only lets managers make suggestions.