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One Step Toward a Babel Fish: Real-Time Voice Translation For Phones
the_newsbeagle writes "Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish, which lived in the brain and could translate any language in the universe, was so incredibly useful that it simultaneously proved and disproved the existence of God. This real-time translation app for mobile phones, offered by the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo, isn't going to freak out theologians any time soon. The company admits it has lots of work to do to improve translation accuracy, and it can currently only translate between Japanese and three languages: English, Korean, and Mandarin. But by allowing phone calls to pierce the language barrier, we just might have taken a step toward the universe that Adams envisioned: one where open communication between people of different cultures leads to an onslaught of terrible bloody warfare."
When machines start translating languages on the fly, people will stop learning other languages and that's a bad thing.
Right now, English is the de-facto lingua franca of the world, because peoples need to talk to each other for business purposes. I reckon that need alone goes a long way to (mostly) maintain world peace, because when someone learns a foreign language, they're also exposed to a foreign culture. Machine translators don't expose those who use them to other cultures.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The name brings back sweet memories to the first useful translation service on the web: babelfish.altavista.com, launched almost 15 years ago. The domain still works, but the fish has been gobbled up by Microsoft and it's redirecting to Microsoft's translation service.
Of course Digital also got their name from Douglas Adams' masterpiece.
It isn't a step towards the babel fish at all. The babel fish delivered brain waves directly to the speach center of the listening person thus needed no knowledge of the language being spoken or received. Simply processing one understood language to another is not any sort of step towards a babel fish.
Well, though the input versatility and the accuracy may need work, by having it translate into two of the three most-spoken languages they're at least a step ahead of Professor Farnsworth.
Slashdot likes to look at projects with potential but the only potential for this project is for a lead article in Popular Mechanics. If you try and use any device like this in real life you will just end up with a sushi chef having a crap in your salad seeing that you just offered him $500,000 to have a dump in the house salad. When you actually said "Fine, bread and house salad it is, and could I have a dumpling on the side?"
And when the cops come don't be surprised when they tazer you for what you called their mothers.
Right now, you have to learn another language if you want exposure to people from foreign cultures. This will lower that barrier.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
These technologies I've seen will certainly be useful, but they're definitely no Babel fish nor substitute for actually learning a language.
My basis for saying this is as a native English speaker with a degree in Computational Linguistics who has studied 3 other languages from various language families and am currently living in a non-English speaking country
To put it simply, until the computer can actually understand what you're saying, that kind of technology will be impossible. Anyone who has even remotely followed AI research in the past, well since AI research started, knows that we haven't seen that kind of breakthrough
What you have is essentially a really fast dictionary. Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who doesn't share your language through a dictionary? Even online? Believe me, while many words will have direct translations, certainly many of them won't. And that is just single words, much less idioms, nuance, honorifics, etc.
I'm sure you've seen plenty of examples of the level of communication that is accomplished via rote dictionary translation. You can get a good idea of what that looks like over at EngrishFunny.com
If that's the level of expression you're comfortable having, by all means, stop studying other languages. Until then, learning other languages will remain just as important as it has since they first came into existence.
The Babelfish lived in your ear, not your brain.
I was working on contract with the dominant Japanese phone manufacturer that supplied NTT DoCoMo. The same concept (pipe dream) was discussed then and we all knew that simultaneous translation of Japanese (insert language) would be here about the same time we all get our flying cars.
Anyone who speaks Japanese knows the Grand Canyon-esque gap in context and meaning between spoken, informal Japanese and slang and idiom-ridden English.
The Babelfish resided in the ear canal, ingested the thought waves created by the process of speaking, and excreted translations...
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Come on. This is more along the lines of Star Trek's Universal Translator - which also happened to predate Adam's excellent stories by more than a decade.
Not to mention there are probably even earlier science fiction stories that included similar tech.
#DeleteChrome
The real question is...would it correctly translate to and from "All your base are belong to us"?
What is "correctly" in this case?
Just a quick note - there is an error/typo in the description of the story. I think the period after Babel fish was intended to go at the end of the sentence.
World peace? ;)
Or more like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YYM209GJoE
...is full of eels.
Or could probably work if placed in any orifice near the brain.
Posted last month - http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/10/22/1212259/japan-getting-real-time-phone-call-translator-app
Sklurb florp Jelfrop skanloop have a good time.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Well if the translating machine works as "well" as Google Translate, the other listening party may feel insulted at times!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
My guess is that when we get instant translators, what we will see is a cross pollination and eventual merging of the different languages. There are ideas that are hard to translate from one language to another. There just isn't an exact translation. So, if you get a sentence along the lines of "My girlfriend was feeling blatsbrigs last night." there would be no translation for blatsbrigs, so you would just use it untranslated to describe how my girlfriend was feeling. We see this all the time with foreign words being picked up in English. If I want layers of noodles, tomato sauce and cheese in a casserole, I don't ask for it with an English word. I ask for lasagna. If I walked up to a friend and said "Hola Joe! How have you been?" I wouldn't even get a funny look.
With a real time translator, the hard line that currently exists between languages would become a very fuzzy one, and each language could easily become an extension of the other.
Douglas Adams thought that open communication between different languages and cultures would lead to terrible ongoing and widespread warfare. But I say he was a pessimist. And also unable to see the real world.
You don't need open communication to lead to terrible ongoing and widespread warfare, we have that right now without the open communication!
All we really need for war is a couple of people who decide that they would rather have the other person's stuff (or only one person deciding that). And for that person to have control over an army or whatever.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
> English is the de-facto lingua franca of the world
Haha, you obviously haven't worked in Japan.
Even when I am working at a US or German based multinational, this is Japan, the employees are Japanese, and by god, everything will be done in Japanese.
I don't see anything wrong with this, however - because it's the same as the US branch of a French company I worked at where everyone wanted to do everything in English.
Either way, the people had the will and the power to use their local language.
Countries that are smaller or less powerful in other ways are more likely to gratefully take any work and learn the language the parent company wants - at least the elite in each company.
For what it's worth, right now I am working for a Japanese communicating with people in US, UK, China, and Korea. We use English for US and UK, and Japanese for Chinese and Korea. (Some of the Chinese know English, the Koreans definitely prefer to use Japanese).
In short, English (or any other language) can only be truly international if every country agrees to it, and Japan has as a country flatly rejected that notion.
You might say "Well fine, then you can't play at our party then", but Japan plays at the party as much as it wants to.
I have also dealt with quite a few people in Germany who didn't know English (or Japanese), so we had to go through double-interpretation to talk to them.
The US and UK can't tell everyone to learn English anymore than Japan can make everyone learn Japanese.
Also, if you consider English the international language now - what about in 50 years? 100? I mean "Lingua Franca" means FRENCH, right? I thought that used to be the international language.
You think companies like Google aren't already trying to do this?
The differences here are enormous. Simple grammatically correct syntax is easy to translate. Casual conversation filled with idioms and things is tough to translate even for humans who might have the cultural and contextual awareness that the machine lacks.
You have two issues here:
1) Speech recognition - This still isn't great, even on basic stuff. See youtube's audio transcriber. It's a train wreck.
2) Translation of languages which are very different like Asian languages and English. Google sometimes does a pretty decent job between English and things like french or other european languages. Now you want to go have it try and translate something like Korean which can have implied subjects and objects as well as hosts of words that "translate" but actually don't really translate in context the way we might think they do...
No, you would need some kind of genuine artificial intelligence to be able to drive this to get it to be useful. 10% doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're already failing to recognize words and then running that through a very imperfect translator that 10 times out of 9 will provide a bad translation of perfectly entered text, I can't really see where you're going to go with this.
This is an interesting question. As someone that knows more than one language, sometimes people ask me "What language do you think in?" or "What language do you dream in?" You convert thoughts to words and sentences so naturally and quickly that it seems they are the same thing (Especially if you only know one language anyway), but I don't think they are.
I think we think in (un-named) concepts, and then convert them into words and construct sentences. .... thinger".
Think about it, sometimes you want to say something, but the word doesn't come out.
Like you want to say "Turn on the light", but you can't remember the word for "light", so you say "turn on the
In my case, if I can't think of the English word because I haven't used it in a long time, the Japanese word easily comes out, so I might say "Turn on the... denki". I don't think I am translating "Light" to "Denki" - especially since I couldn't remember the word light anyway. I am just thinking about that thing that you turn on that makes it bright.
My guess is that we think relatively language neutral, but we convert to words in any language we know well so easily that it's hard to differentiate.
Kind like people were afraid because of the calculator everybody will stop practice and be efficient in math.
But on the other hand we are no way close to an accurate voice recognition software(see Siri) or an 100% accurate translation (see google translate). So nothing to worry about. Yet.
> Also, if you consider English the international language now - what about in 50 years? 100?
Exactly. Also changes in that area are slow. There are countries already giving basic Mandarin courses to students (Panama, I've read) and it's increasingly easier to find Mandarin courses over here (Brazil). Given the current political stance of China, that may somewhat too early, but then... changes happen.
> I mean "Lingua Franca" means FRENCH, right? I thought that used to be the international language.
Lingua Franca, if I recall Webster's definition, referred to a particular mix of French, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages used throughout the Mediterranean as a common, international language (so it was not exactly French).
The expression "Lingua Franca" seems itself to be Latin and is almost exactly the same in Portuguese (my native language, in which "Lingua" has an acute sign over the "i"). I believe it means "Free Language" with "free" in this context having to do with liberty (not cost). "Franca" works both ways, just like "free".
Some types of thinking are done more easily in a human language, whereas other sorts of thinking don't require a language at all - deciding whether to eat something does not require knowing a language.
But I disagree that we are language neutral. Language affects thinking. Language affects what you can easily remember after you think it.
Some concepts/thoughts are more easily expressed in some languages. If you have no word for a concept/thought, it is harder for you to rethink it even if you managed to think of it the first time. You have to assign a word or other symbol to it, or take extra effort to remember it.
If you have not assigned a symbol to a concept/thought it makes it a lot harder to build on top of it. If you have no words for pleasure and enjoyment, it would be harder think of the "schadenfreude" concept.
Whereas once you know the symbol/word/phrase for something, you just have to think of it, then the thought pattern/concept is brought to your mind. Just like thinking of chocolate and bring various thoughts to your mind. This compression and decompression of thought to and from symbols is how some thinking is done. The symbols may evoke emotions, and the emotions may then influence our decision.
In my experience, about 90% of the time I'm left confused. The output is almost always meaningless. For it to be coherently insulting would require a bizarre fluke of clarity.
As a concrete example, Google will translate the local "no" word, which has no alternative meanings, into "yes", "no", and "maybe". Bizarrely, it usually also wants to translate "Estonia" or "Finland" into "England". This is so broken that it's worse than useless. Google should be ashamed of it.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Anyone who believes that machines can replace learning a language has clearly never left his country or spent more than a week abroad. There are technical and cultural issues that render such statements nonsense.
Technical:
- you need to speak like another machine for these systems to recognize what you say. Start putting some accent (like the different Latin-Spanish versions), or dialects (like in Germany or China), slang, and the model breaks quickly.
- no system is able to mix languages. And you need this. It is common to mix languages with certain words, street names, person names, etc. from other languages.
- street language. Even if the sound recognition were perfect, no machine translator can possibly translate what you hear on the street.
Cultural:
- go to a sales meeting and you are trying to sell your business services to a customer using your voice as translation. Your competitor speaks the language fluently, using idioms and other tricks. Guess who gets the deal.
- pick-up a girl in Italy using a phone/voice translation and I will aplaud you.
- attend university abroad using your tech-device.
- tell a Joke to your phone, hoping that its translation will make your foreign friends laugh.
the list is endless. So is this a good invention? Yes. Will it work? Maybe in the future for some limited purposes. Will it replace learning languages? Heck no.
All your secret are belong to us?
DISCLAIMER: I have NOT read any of the EULA for their service, and this may be covered therein.
<hat style="tinfoil"> An exaggeration, I know. Still, the cynic in me can't help but imagine that someone else has come up with the idea of using, say, a keyword list and filtering certain "interesting" communications aside for further scrutiny. They have the source and destination telephone numbers, too. Since they ARE a phone company, it would be easy enough to pre-populate a filter with phone numbers. Of course, they'd need to be circumspect about it, because if word got out, it might dry up business. Sure, there's also Google's translate service as well as Apple's Siri, and a host of others (email, voice mail, etc.)</hat>
IOW, Is it a wiretap when both parties voluntarily go through your service?
This is not a step, but a tiny tiptoe, if that. The best commercially-available voice recognition program (DNS) is capable of around 95% accuracy, but only if you have a high-quality mic, are in an otherwise silent environment, and speak clearly and evenly. With phones you're taking conversational voice sampled at very low bitrates with a variety of levels of background noise, which is going to severely impact the VR accuracy. You're then going to put that slightly mangled VR-generated text through a machine translation engine, which, as anyone who works between Japanese and English knows very well, will utterly destroy anything but the shortest phrases. With the raw VR-generated text, you at least have some context from which to guess what mistaken words were supposed to mean, but you kill that ability when you run it through MT. I can't say anything about the Japanese-Korean or Korean-English side of things, but the Japanese-English product will be utterly unusable garbage, I guarantee. ...and I don't know why people are freaking out about the MS video posted a short while ago. If you actually pay attention you'll see that the VR text was riddled with mistakes. I'd really like to hear the opinion of someone who speaks Chinese, and see how it performs with an everyday conversation rather than a speech someone prepared and recited in a slow, clear voice.
Um you do realize that Japanese schools teach english right? Most Japanese people have at least spent 3 years (sometimes 6) learning english before they even get to the college level. Now most learn from other Japanese people so their accent sucks (hence the term 'engrish'), but most of the people who have gone through Japanese schools since the 50's have some concept of english...
Now obviously in atypical workday where everyone is natively similar I'd expect them to speak Japanese rather than bad english at each other, but you seem to be suggesting that the Japanese don't want to learn english... Yet they all do (how much they remember is a different story).
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
This has a link to youtube a Microsoft demo that do "real-time" English text recognization. The text caption of the speech is done by their software. Later on in the video, they demonstrated an English to Chinese translation with work from their Toronto research. They digitize the English speaker's own voice pattern so that the machine speech would have the same speech characteristic but in Chinese. You can hear the applause from their Chinese audiences after each of the translations as the speech quality (for the canned demo) is excellent.
http://micgadget.com/31434/microsoft-demos-breakthrough-english-chinese-translation-system/
"de-facto lingua franca"
Interesting choice of words to assert that English is the supreme language for international communication. Not that I completely disagree with you major point as stated, but interesting in its own right that merely one language was not enough to express the same idea.
Condemning things and supplies.
That they are taught it in school doesn't mean they WANT to learn it. And as you say, most of them will never use English out of school. And then it's really quickly forgotten - a foreign language you must continue to use or you lose it.
My hovercraft is full of eeeeels!
What? What word don't you understand?
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/And_Now_For_Something_Completely_Different#Hungarian_Phrase_Book
"my hovercraft is full of eels!"
The Babel Fish does not live in your brain, it lives in your ear.
The Book (according to every version I've ever seen committed to film) shows a picture of a Babel fish in situ, inside the hosts ear.
From THHGTTG:
"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix."
It is a universal translator which simultaneously translates from one spoken language to another. It takes the brainwaves of the other body and what they are thinking then transmits the thoughts to the speech centres of the host's brain, the speech heard by the ear decodes the brainwave matrix. When inserted into the ear, its nutrition processes convert unconscious sound waves into conscious brain waves, neatly crossing the language divide between any species.
The book points out that the Babel fish could not possibly have developed naturally, and therefore both proves and disproves the existence of God:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys. But this did not stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme for his best selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up for God. Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
http://www.lamebook.com/thanks-bing/
I learned 2 years of Spanish in high school (over 25 years ago) and I still remember enough to follow Spanish conversations by picking up every second or third word.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
It's sound, not "sount", dolt.