Japan Getting Real-Time Phone Call Translator App

another random user writes with news that NTT Docomo, Japan's largest wireless carrier, will be rolling out a real-time translation app for phone calls on November 1. At launch, the app will translate Japanese into English, Mandarin, and Korean, and later that month it will add French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai. No word on Klingon. From the article: "The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism. However, the software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations. ... It provides users with voice translations of the other speaker's conversation after a slight pause, as well as providing a text readout. ... NTT Docomo will soon face competition from France's Alcatel-Lucent which is developing a rival product, WeTalk. It can handle Japanese and about a dozen other languages including English, French and Arabic. The service is designed to work over any landline telephone, meaning the company has had to find a way to do speech recognition using audio data sampled at a rate of 8kHz or 16kHz. Other products — which rely on data connections — have used higher 44kHz samples which are easier to process."

Comments

Star Trek

[MyLongNickName]

One step closer to Star Trek. Seriously, though, someone needs to set up a "BadPhoneCallTranslation.com" domain and set it to replay some of the funniest or awkward phone call translations.

And on an unrelated note, I am now seeing stories with red bars at the top. Am I now seeing articles to be posted in the future? Or is this just another Slashdot weird redesign?

Re:Star Trek

[Anonymous Coward]

The red bars show it's a new story without comments yet. For such a low UID I'm surprised you'd never seen it before

Re:Star Trek

[CRCulver]

One step closer to Star Trek.

Still far away, though. This project is making use of giant pre-existing databases of English and Japanese in order to translate speech from one language to the other. The Star Trek universal translator, on the other hand, was capable of translating between English and previously unknown alien languages. Because of the principle of l'arbitraire du signe and the frequent use of idioms in human speech, in order for a computer to be able to learn and translate from a previously undocumented language (as opposed to useful but flawed Google Translate-like methods), we would essentially need true AI, and that doesn't seem likely in the coming years.

"Cut Costs"

[TaoPhoenix]

Ever notice that none of these stories are ever written from the jobs perspective? "I lost my translation job because ___ company is rolling out a software program that will do my job for them."

Repeat until there are no jobs left.

Re:"Cut Costs"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well, and candle makers and horse carriage makers also lost their jobs. And so did coal shovelers and pretzel salters.

The goal here is, to free humanity from primitive low-level jobs, so that they can concentrate on cool and interesting challenges.
In fact we're already so far with this, that we (at least in Germany) could offer unconditional base income (generated from those automated low-level jobs), so people can do exactly that: Work on making dreams come true.
And: No, contrary to what the industrialists want to tell you, humans won't become lazy slobs when they aren't forced into slave labor. It has been shown, time and time again, that people need that freedom to create something really great, and historically, artists and inventors thrived when there was such a space.

You're assuming people are dumbasses that can't strive for higher things if they have the freedom and resources. They aren't. Most people just grew up to assume being stupid is cool and that they could feel entitled to get everything pre-chewed and wrapped in 10 miles of idiot padding. They can do much more, if they have to or want to.

Also, if you ever tried those translations systems, you'll know that it's not a low-level job at all, and it will still take a long time, before we don't need human translators anymore. If somebody has a business deal of any importance, you can bet your ass, that he won't risk losing it because he was too cheap to get a real human translator.

Conclusion: Don't be so passive! You're not a machine that gets used and thrown away by companies at will. You have your own will. (Or at least you should.) Do something great with it! Be an individual! Otherwise, are you even really alive?

Re:"Cut Costs"

[ShanghaiBill]

Repeat until there are no jobs left.

Too late. The Neolithic agricultural revolution already eliminated 90% of all hunter-gatherer jobs, and then the Industrial Revolution and mechanization of agriculture destroyed the few jobs that were left. Today, most people have nothing to do but sit around posting economic fallacies on Slashdot.

Re:"Cut Costs"

[Alioth]

But that never seems to happen though.

I was watching a TV programme called "The Mighty Micro" (it's available on YouTube), a 6-part documentary on the coming microprocessor made in the late 1970s by the BBC. It was interesting to see what predictions came true and which ones were wide of the mark. In the final programme, the pundits were predicting what would happen. Everything from the cashless society by the mid-1990s (didn't happen), to the prediction of massive easily accessible data (did happen), to huge reforms in education (partially happened).

One prediction that was made that by the mid 1990s we would probably only be working 20 hours weeks, and society would have to shift to a model where we don't work much. However, the opposite has happened. Not only is the workforce larger than ever (Britain's workforce is probably double what it was in the late 1970s), unemployment is lower (in Britain, despite the workforce being twice the size of the late 70s workforce, the absolute number of unemployed is 1 million people fewer despite the worst recession in nearly a century), and many sections of the work force work longer hours than they used to. (Ironically, it's in the computer industry where the longer hours are more extreme, for example in the United States you're seen as a slacker unless you routinely work 60-80 hour weeks).

Re:"Cut Costs"

[mcgrew]

Just use the magic word "H1B" and all that changes

Technological advances that take jobs have been normal since the industrial revolution. Hiring cheap foreign workers has not. E.g., the railroads didn't import Irishmen and Chinamen on H1Bs, they hired immigrants.

Accents

[girlintraining]

I'm still waiting for an english-only voice processing software package that can translate boston and texan accents, and god help you if you have a southern drawl, or english-as-a-second-language. Poor bastards who speak Russian can't 'V' to save their soul.

Re:Accents

[ciderbrew]

Having to use a second language to work translation software may not be the end goal. When it can do Glaswegian you know it is working well.
Dyer wanei wee piece weya'ships?

Re:Accents

[Loki_666]

Russians don't have a problem with V per se. V or Russian (veh) are not a problem at all... especially when they are trying to say W. When they want to say V though they say W.

Its most baffling.

The funniest bit is how they use H instead of G, when they have the perfectly serviceable (yes, it looks like eXs, its closer to cHa), so you get names like Garry Potter and Prince Garry..... can't say i've heard of either of those dudes, but Russians seem to think they are famous.

Re:jobs are going away

[TaoPhoenix]

Nope AC. Of course there's the gap.

The job goes away as fast as the slip in the Manager's office. Rent's due next week and you needed that paycheck. The "Opportunity" doesn't show up for years.

Don't worry humans

[vlm]

limiting its use in some situations.

Don't worry humans, most of you are not going to lose your translation job.

We already limit human translators to "important" stuff only.

The people most likely to lose their jobs are Indian call centers. Soon, you'll be "talking" to Bob at Dell who walks you thru power cycling your windows box, but he's actually in Afghanistan and doesn't speak a word of English. Also instead of telemarketing scum leaving messages on my answering machine, they'll be having Turing test conversations about how I should vote for any politician but Johnson (whom I am voting for).

I'm sure there will be a contractual limitation not to do anything important with the service "So I'm not telling ya all, that ya all can't not shut off the backup reactor cooling pump disabling relay..." WTF does that mean in English much less Japanese? So... no critical infrastructure support, no medical, no legal, no engineering, no management, no HR, no accounting... whats left other than telemarketing and call centers?

Devaluation of language skills?

[Compaqt]

It seems that the devaluation of language skills would be a corollary of costs being cut.

After all, if companies won't pay extra for language skills, why acquire them (while you're in high school)?

Ironically, these sorts of apps may lead to lower levels of foreign language ability within a given society. Instead of having millions of French, Chinese, and German speakers in, say, the US, you would end up concentrating language skills in a few computer systems (Google's, Apples, maybe Wolfram's).

Gene Roddenberry does it again!

[tekrat]

Can you imagine how rich this dude would have been had he actually patented every concept he came up with for Star Trek? Fortunately, back then you couldn't patent a concept, because our government wasn't as corrupt.

And therein lies the ultimate irony of Star Trek; for everything Gene got right about the tech, he failed miserably predicting human nature and greed.

Re:Gene Roddenberry does it again!

[kj_kabaje]

You forget that we need a collapse in society first... Perhaps he could still be right?

Meme time

[Luckyo]

I wonder what you'll have to say into the phone in japanese to get "all your base belong to us" out of it.

It would be amazing but it won't work

[SmallFurryCreature]

IF you translate between Japanese and English it would be FAR FAR FAR easier to do it with text first. Have you seen some of the translations google comes up with? Often it ain't even good enough to get the gist of the original message, let alone be good enough to carry a conversation.

With speech to speech translation, you got to first have proper voice regonization, a far from perfect technology, then have good translation, which doesn't yet exist especially for such totally different languages as japanese/english. And then you got have good text to speech. Which ALSO still isn't anything to write home about or computer game would use it to be able to forgo voice acting and have far more flexible scripts including usage of player chosen names.

Combine all three and engrish.com better get some extra hosting to store all the hilarious screwups.

The reason Japanese/English is so hard to translate is that the languages are completely different in which the way you say something and what information is included/excluded is totally different. And then people make it worse by leaving things out they expect someone from their own circle to know but that someone from another culture needs to make things clear. How would you translate 'dude'. And yes I know that is a lousy example of hip and happening street talk but I am a nerd, what do I know of being hip. But the translating engine better knows or you are going to get a tower of babel.

If this new solution magically improve all three fields needed to an as yet unheard of standard, it would be amazing. I doubt it, but it would be amazing.

Now just convince the japanese to stop putting all the text on their webpages in images and we might actually be able to make the world a bit smaller. Oh and get companies to make deal with global payment services so anyone can use their local payment system to pay anywhere in the world.

My prediction: crap.

[OldSport]

I currently use the best commercial voice recognition software, and have experience with a variety of machine translation suites that do Japanese-English, so I have somewhat of a frame of reference.

With respect to the former, the quality is quite good. I can speak at a relatively natural pace and get upwards of 95% accuracy. That said, I still have to adjust my speech in a sometimes unnatural manner to be sure the program "hears" me correctly, and I have heard horror stories from people with different accents/dialects having a terrible time. (Someone made a joke about Welsh, but I know a Welsh fellow and he had some colorful things to say about the commercially-available VR programs.) An additional complicating factor in the J-E scenario is that Japanese has many words that sound nearly identical, and are distinguished only by slight inflections: (hashi; chopsticks) and (hashi; bridge) is a typical example. There are thousands of examples of such words, and from what I understand, Japanese voice recognition software is quite far behind because of this particular trait. Without a UI for speakers to choose which word they are actually trying to say, I can imagine that the VR side of this program has a slew of problems.

Now, onto machine translation. As it stands, MT works great for some language pairs, but Japanese-English is notoriously problematic. AFAIK part of the reason is the highly contextual nature of the Japanese language. Subjects and objects are often omitted entirely, for example. I don't really have to go into this in detail -- just run any Japanese Wikipedia article through Google translate and see what happens. Other commercially-available and proprietary software I've used has been basically the same (Google actually seems to be a bit better, usually.) English-Japanese is a bit easier because the context (subjects, objects, verbs) are typically "all there" -- so even if the result is Japanese that is horribly unnatural, you may still be able to get the info you need.

But now, they're going to take the VR-generated input of varying degrees of accuracy, and run THAT through MT software that butchers even the most simple and perfect sentences? I could be wrong, but I'm having trouble seeing how the result will be anything less than a disaster. "The software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations" sounds like the understatement of the year. Get ready for synthesized-voice gobbeldygook and an mp3 website called "spoken Engrish."

(Full disclosure: I am a translator, but in a lot of ways a yearn for the day when MT will be good enough to put me out of a job; I think the idea of people being able to instantly communicate with speakers of other languages is exciting and would lead to a much more open world. However, I've been hearing that tech like this is 3-5 years away for decades now. If this product showcased a revolutionary engine for MT, then I would be singing a different tune, but for now it seems like a mere combination of two imperfect technologies.)

Re:Great.

[ShanghaiBill]

Yet another reason for the Japanese not to learn English properly. As if we didn't have enough Engrish already!

A few years ago I was eating dinner with some gaijin friends in Tokyo, and a Japanese guy came over to our table, introduced himself, and sat down and started talking in a weird, unintelligible language. We couldn't understand a word he was staying. Then the waitress explained that he was trying to tell us that he was an English teacher at the local high school, and the language he was speaking was English.

Re:Great.

[Shaiku]

They actually teach Engrish instead of English in Japanese public schools, which perpetuates the problem. Your anecdote is sadly one of so many... I forget her name, but there was a well-known native English foreign exchange student in Japan who had English class with them and the teacher would "correct" her English until she spoke Engrish....

Re:Great.

[Psyborgue]

You might be thinking of this.