Universal Translators?

bughunter writes "Carnegie Mellon University is announcing a 'spontaneous' translation system that allows speakers of different tongues to converse in natural language in real time. " I never liked the idea of putting aquatic creatures in my ear anyway.

Comments

This is supposed to work?

[Ethelred Unraed]

Hm. Interesting idea, but there are some instances where the device can't possibly work in "real-time". Simple example that's close to my heart: translating from German to English on-the-fly. Problem: German has the rather odd habit of smacking verbs at the end of the sentence, often a loooonnnng way away from the subject, whereas English prefers to have the subject and verb at the beginning of the sentence (especially in spoken English).

The story goes that an English visitor to Germany in the 19th century went to see a political debate with Otto von Bismarck, with her translator in tow. The debate went on, with Bismarck himself saying nothing, until finally he rose to speak at length about some minutely detailed point of law. The visitor craned forward to hear her translator, who for quite some time said nary a word--until the visitor became impatient and asked what Bismarck was saying, to which the translator replied, "Please, madam, I am waiting for the verb!"

QED.

Ethelred

How does it SOUND?

[Admiral Burrito]

Cool, but how does it SOUND? All the computer speach products I've heard sound very monotonous.

Is it available in Klingon?

[jinschoi]

It would come in real handy at those Star Trek conventions for people who don't want to go to the trouble of learning Klingon.

I wonder if it does a better job than AltaVista's babelfish.

Don't abandon your language classes anytime soon

[squireson]

People have been working toward this kind o fthing for a long time , with slow and painful successes . They are still no where near having a reliable solution . A friend ( and member of our LUG ) is a Mathematical Linguist and works on Automated Machine Translation software . His comments over the last year give me good reason to be skeptical .

I am betting that this turns out to be the kind of thing that voice to text did . Wonderful idea , almost worked first time out . Almost worked two years later . Almost works five years later . Still wouldn't waste my time with it now .

Besides , who wants to wisper sweet nothings through a throat box ...
Your squire
Squireson

How, exactly, does it handle colloquials?

[Angwe]

Okay, so it can handle colloquialisms, but what does it do with them?

Does it do a literal translation of the colloquialism? (Russian phrase "Don't go catching any flying penises in your mouth.") Or does it try to find the closest idiom in the other language? (Said Russian phrase would best be translated, "Don't act stupid, like you don't know what's going on." It's from a Russian fairy tale.)

Also, one encounters the possibility of there being no equivalent phrase. And what about weighted concepts? Many Asian languages, due to cultural influence, have an inherent extra emotional meaning attached to declarations of honor, but there is no easy way to translate this into English.

This sounds like a HUGE step forward, but I'm still gonna be skeptical and double check machines with people.

Re:How, exactly, does it handle colloquials?

[fable2112]

That's what I want to know.

And simply put, there is NO WAY that it will be able to catch them all. Colloquial phrases are always changing. Remember "Don't have a cow, man"?

And no-equivalent-phrase is always a pain to deal with. I studied advanced French and came across the occasional "not-really-translate-able" phrase. Those are not fun.

Online friends of mine are blind and use text-readers. They have enough problems with mispronunciation and tripping over *emphasized* words on a system that doesn't allow for HTML formatting.

And Babelfish online has made some interesting mistakes. Can't remember the URL, but lokisdottir over on Geocities posted some translations of her writing to another language and back again to show how badly Babelfish can mess up.

Instant translation? Not anytime soon. *shrug*

Re:translating telephone?

[Omar Djabji]

This product has great practical value for terrorists who want to talk to their american captives without hiring interpreters. (who wants to work for terrorists? We have all seen enough bond movies to know what happens to ex-terrorst employees.)

Quick, put this product on the export restrictions list!!!!!!

Aquatic Creatures

[E29]

Hey! What's wrong with Babelfish? They don't cause any problems and they're highly cross platform (all you need is an ear of some sort). Sure they may not be avaliable in stereo yet, but who needs stereo when talking to a Vogan anyways.

Re:Pretty impressive.

[for(;;);]

Yakman> This is pretty impressive, but nothing too
Yakman> surprising I guess.

I'll take issue with that. It's pretty impressive, and damned surprising, but probably untrue. If they actually had what they claimed to have, they'd be in line for the Nobel prize. The CMU press release makes no mention of any flaws in the product; for all the reader knows, this product can translate text from any language into text in another language as well as a human. Again, this would be damned surprising! If this were true, we'd be seeing this press release on the cover of Time, and almost every other publication. A program able to process natural language that well would be able to pass the Turing test. And think about it -- if a program could really translate anything (as well as a human) from English to French, why not modify it to translate from English to a recursively-enumerable subset of English (as well as a human)? Who would need programmers after that? If they really had what they implicitly claim to have, it would be a big deal.

Writing a program that can translate natural languages as well as a human is a holy grail, and not something that should be claimed (or implicitly claimed) lightly.

I'd bet anything that this is babelfish-level translation software with voice recognition software (probably of comparable quality) slapped on. This is another example of marketing folks (or, god forbid, the programmers) trying to hype the features of a product and, by neglecting to mention its limitations, ending up lying about what the program can do.

This product is mildly interesting from a software development point-of-view, but not anything I'd go firing my human translator staff over.



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"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
==> "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

Is it Janus?

[reverse solidus]

Hmmm, very revealing... According to the CMU website, the system (presumably Janus) is limited domain, which certainly makes things much easier. Still pretty cool, though.