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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 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/
Not to rain on Gene's parade, but the "communicator" has been in use since the smoke signal.
Yeah Robert Heinlein's characters had cellular phones in the late 1940's but I wouldn't claim he was the first. The only bit he got wrong was where a character ends a call because he is in a crowded area. That wouldn't happen today.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So basically, the fine print on one of their service contracts.
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."
ST communicators (at least in TOS, which was the only version of the show before actual cell phones) weren't very different from handheld radios, with a manual tuning knob that was shown used to try to improve the reception. Except for the size (and, IIRC, the fact that they were identified as transmitting FTL, though that might have only been in later written material), they weren't all that much different from what existed at the time the show was made.
Lasers existed at the time Star Trek was made, too. Handheld laser weapons didn't, but Star Trek wasn't at all the first place where eitehr laser weapons specifically (which are treated as "old tech" in ST) or beam weapons more generally were predicted.
As your own hyperdrive link states, both the "hyperdrive" and the "subspace" (a term also used by ST in the same context) were theorized in the 1950s. And other concepts of FTL travel existed. Star Trek was hardly the first place the existence of an FTL drive was proposed.
This is nothing like a universal translator. If it was then it wouldn't work on 11 languages, it would work on all of them.
And you're jumping the gun a bit claiming hyperdrive as a real technology. Just because the pentagon is paying loads of money to research something doesn't mean it has any legitimacy, e.g. remote viewing.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.
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!
Chinese is an accepted blanket term for the dialects in that country. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
They didn't know which of the two Italians to trust. Removing one would have certainly upset the other and you don't wanna mess with Italians. Just in case (horse, bed, head... need I say more).
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
Making the leap from telephone to communicator is hardly ESP, and a cel phone won't work from orbit.
Star Trek phasers are particle beam emitters, very different from lasers.
The hyperdrive you refer to was actually conceived before Star Trek: "Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in the 1950s" Heim also coined the term "sub-space" which is used widely throughout Star Trek, so clearly Roddenberry was aware of the subject matter, like any proficient nerd of that era.
And let's not overlook all the technologies predicted in Star Trek that won't enter reality, or the episode where Picard talks about the still-unproven Fermat's Last Theorem.
Or better yet we could shut up and get on with our lives... nah!
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
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?
now, i'm no expert in languages, but i do see that google translate also translate to/from chinese also, so i'm surprised that you claim it is a non-existant language?
also, wikipedia have a page about the chinese language - whereas, conversely, and in support of the other half of your statement, they don't have a page for the indian language, instead having a page for the languages of india.
perhaps we differ over uses of semantics here? perhaps you would've been happier if they'd specified traditional or simplified chinese?
like i say - i'm no expert, i'm just sayin' - that's all. ;-)
They shoul have repeated Chinese, not Italian. From IBM's site: "...It can convert English to and from Arabic, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish."
$sig not found
Yep, today, the phone call would just be dropped due to the network being overloaded... :)
Unless said press conference was from the 70s, Thomas J Watson hasn't been the CEO of IBM in over 3 decades. The current CEO is Samuel J Palmisano.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
idioms?
There is only one written language called "Chinese". Within that language, there are some simplified characters and traditional characters. Most mainland Chinese know mostly simplified forms (only of certain characters), and most other Chinese use the elaborate or traditional forms. This is basically due to the mainland Chinese effort to improve literacy by teaching primarily simplified characters when possible. However, they are just different forms for the words, and were used side-by-side historically in Chinese writing (simplified forms as shorthand for traditional forms). So yes, there is a Chinese written language, and it is certainly not non-existent. In fact, it was the lingua franca of the Far East, used commonly in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam much in the same way that Latin was in the West.
If you are referring to Mandarin / Cantonese / any-other-dialect, those are only spoken differences that vary everywhere in China, and even from village to village some people may not be able to understand each other. They don't dictate any written differences whatsoever because Chinese characters are usually ideographic, expressing a particular idea rather than the sound that represents it. For example, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan may write something the exact same way, but the pronunciation will be very different.
Accordingly, you will notice that there is no "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" option in any text translation tool.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
A few examples from the Heinlein juvenile books between 1950 and 1960:
Roddenberry was derivative at best. Many other authors of the time were using similar devices.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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."
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!
IBM wanted to be able to say: "This one goes to eleven".
English is not this
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.
There's written Cantonese that's not the same as written Mandarin.
See: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/468/
And that word is common in Cantonese.
The Chinese mainlanders might no longer be as aware of the differences due to the Chinese Government trying to get everyone to standardize on Mandarin (down to making everyone use Mandarin names), but that's not so true elsewhere.
As for Taiwan, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoy_dialect#Negative_particles
e.g.
"Bo" in Amoy/Hokkien (one syllable) can be two words in Mandarin- "mei yo", or one ("bu") depending on the situation.
"not", "can not" are "mm" and "bay" in hokkien respectively, but the same word in Mandarin ("bu").
So officially they might be the same, but in practice it's not so simple.
The written language is more like a different language that the non-Mandarin users shoe-horn their spoken languages into when the time comes for writing stuff down :).
Even the Japanese used Chinese characters in the past (and still use some nowadays). And what they wrote/write with it was not always the "One Chinese Written Language".
Oh yah see also these compound cantonese words:
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/468/?full=true
For example:
Cantonese: m4 hou2 juk1 (typically shorted to "moh yook") = don't move (you'll hear/see this used in those Hong Kong cop shows ;) )
Mandarin writers would typically use a different bunch of characters to express that (bie dong?). I doubt they'll write "not good (to) move", even though a direct translation would probably be something like that.
There is indeed "written cantonese", but yes a lot of it is similar to written Mandarin.
FWIW, I'm not expert in Cantonese or Mandarin, so you'll probably get better info from someone who knows both well.
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.