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'Tower of Babel' Translator Under Development
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:36 PM
from the what-did-he-say dept.
from the what-did-he-say dept.
monopole writes "The BBC is reporting on a bilingual translator under development by Carnegie Mellon University which senses sub-vocalized speech, recognizes it, translates it and then synthesizes the translation. The overall effect would be to dub the speech of the speaker."
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Science: DARPA Starts Ultimate Language Translation Project 123 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the ultimate speech translation engine project that would be capable of real-time interpretation of television and radio programs as well as printed or online textual information in order to be summarized, abstracted, and presented to human analysts emphasizing points of particular interest." If combined with the tower of babel project we discussed earlier, it could only lead to awesomeness.
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The science behind it is fascinating (Score:5, Funny)
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It's called a universal translator [wikipedia.org]
Continued.. (Score:3, Funny)
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The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Tower of Babel Translator in your ear
No, no, you're thinking of a babelfish. The Tower has to be inserted up a completely different orifice.
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I'ma go out on a limb here, but do ya think that perhaps the bible is mostly allegorical? I mean, I'm no theologist, but it would seem to me that the tower of babel story is more of a warning to the masons of the time that if they try to build too high, they'll be fucked.
I would think that the "message" from "god" is closer to "you don't understand my creation well enough to build this yet... in time you will..."
Then again, maybe I'm just a heathen...
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While an intelligent assumption for a person who has not delved into the history of the bible, it is however mostly wrong.
The allegory belief usually comes when one distances himself from the Bible. The less you read it (be you agnostic or Christian) the more likely you are to believe that it is allegorical and disjointed.
The bible is at best a historical account of a group of people through their eyes, thus needs to be
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He should have filed patents and brought patent infringement lawsuit like everyone else.
Other Languages (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think that's kind of like saying that if calculators get good enough, no one needs to know math anymore.
In fact, this will probably be used in many of the same places - anywhere you'd find a cash register, you'll probably find automated translaters. You won't see them used in academia or in diplomacy, though.
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Ain't Going to Happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Language is complicated!
Parent
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Re:Other Languages (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, even translation by the best humans still destroys a lot of the subtlety and beauty in a language. It's a best a piecemeal game. Hell, most novels/tv shows are not even translated literally, some artistic liberty is usually taken to make the work "flow" in the language it is being translated into. Translation is great for contracts or technical documents, but if you really want to understand a culture then you need to learn its language.
Parent
Re:Other Languages (Score:4, Informative)
For example, what's the difference in (UK) English between: "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less"? In US English they're used interchangably, but in UK English they're opposites. There are many such words or phrases in the English language alone where the precise word chosen (or connotations of a word) totally changes the meaning of the entire phrase, even reversing it's meaning.
Another example would be a simple phrase in US English like "he was pissed"? US meaning is "he was angry". In UK English it means "he was drunk", and a word-for-word translation into greek it would be meaningless (the equivalent idiom in Greek would be something like "he took it on the skull").
Seriously - if you ever want to understand the drawback to automatic translation, try getting two Greek friends to talk colloquially to you, but translating each individual word into English - it's completely unintelligible.
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Communication != understanding (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Other Languages (Score:5, Interesting)
As an example, I was once called upon to translate the simple advertising slogan "Si Misura" from Italian to English. This had already been translated as "Made to Measure."
Quick, without thinking, tell me what the product was?
If you're a native English speaker you probably think of a suit or dress. Maybe a kitchen cabinet. Some tool with human ergonomic requirements.
The product was a liquid chemical compound, so I translated it into the correct English idiom for such; "Custom Blended."
And with that simple example we haven't even touched on issues of syntax yet; or more complicated issues of social usage (say formal vs. informal forms).
KFG
Parent
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Language is not composed of words. It is composed of idiomatic phrases (idiomatic phrases do not mean what the words mean) only understandable in context.
That's like saying humans aren't composed of cells. We are composed of organs who's functions are not useful in isolation. Idioms are composed of words, and the words are vital. Just like an organ will cease to work if you change the component cells, the idiom will cease to mean what you want it to if you change the component words.
True automatic tran
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Duh, that's easy, it's "small plastic brick" even kids know that !
Re:Other Languages (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Re:Other Languages (Score:5, Insightful)
There are practical advantages in problem solving which have been tied to the language used in mental formulation, for example the development of what is metaphorically called "logical circuitry" has been shown to diverge between native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers [newscientist.com].
My expectation is that spoken language will eventually go the way of handwriting: creature comfort, dying art, what once defined the best of us but becomes in many cases an indulgent inefficiency. How?
Anybody who dares to at this point, has realized they can jam wires into the human brain and let it learn to control machines on the other end. It's already beyond that in fact, with embedded communication devices being the next step, stepping shoe now currently in air: you'll see in a few days in Nature how real the "Neurochip" [news-medical.net] already is.
People should stop pretending this is about helping paraplegics by playing Space Invaders or moving a cursor with mind control, or that we're only trying to help brain injury, stroke, or paralysis patients. This is about construction workers with better than human strength in their better than human limbs. We drive vehicles through obstacles on land at 10 times the speed human beings can run, and we fly vehicles at 800 times the speed we can biologically move ourselves. We are mentally capable of managing bodily abilities far beyond those with which we are born.
This is not only about helping the disabled, and it's not only about incredible speeds or strengths. It's also about perfectly able people who would rather control personal electronics with their thoughts than search for or decipher other remote control electronics. Personal electronics are going to be a lot more personal, too; these people will eventually prefer to have personal electronics embedded in their bodies and networked with their minds.
Don't worry about losing human language: we will only lose it when we'll be better off for it, when we communicate and think better without it. The translator here, with IBM and elsewhere is of course more narrowly focused, but with this we are converging on technological telepathy and obsoleting human language.
Human logic and good intentions have come at it from a more traditional, less technological direction, giving us Esperanto [esperanto.net], Loglan [loglan.org], Lojban [lojban.org], etc. You've probably heard of only one of these, which you probably laughed at somebody for being Geek enough to know any of. Most of them have been great ideas and well executed, but despite inherent gains in efficiency or intellectual force they are nowhere near the markets and their returns depend on mass adoption. Technology is different, it's tied directly to markets and to private profiteering with immediate amplification of wealth among the wealthy. Human beings are not going to create a better enough language, soon enough, before we create a technology which in itself superior to all human language. BG
Parent
that's awesome (Score:3, Funny)
subvocalization (Score:5, Informative)
Subvocalization is basically micro-movements of the muscles associated with speech. The Wikipedia article mostly focuses on reading & subvocalization, so I wonder, do you have to be trained to do it consciously?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_speech_reco
This wikipedia article says that recognition is hard.
Re:subvocalization (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
universal translators, here we come! (Score:2)
Remind me to turn this off at work (Score:5, Funny)
It's only a matter of time before this thing gets me fired.
Just like the Ferengi.... (Score:2)
Of course we'd have to avoid any and all Theta radiation or they'd start malfunctioning. I don't know about you guys but when Rom was trying to find the reset button on Nog's translator implant during episode #77 of DS9 it looked pretty painful.
Question of the Millenium (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who has studied languages knows (not "no"s or "nose") that English absolutely sucks (as in is bad, not as in pulls air into itself), but we use it widely (as in across a large range of people and places, not as in having a large girth) in large part (as in a significant reason, not as in being a big piece of something) due to the primary sources of finance and technology being in English-speaking countries (not literally the countries, but their people).
I like the idea, and see the huge, positive social impact it could have, but I feel sorry for the guy/gal responsible for it to test its ability to translate into/out of English.
Re:Question of the Millenium (Score:4, Funny)
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English is trivial to learn well enough to communicate. The reason? You only really need to learn vocabulary. All the points raised previously about the difficulty of automatic translation are kind of true but, for Englis
Re:Question of the Millenium (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to say, English is not as unusual as you would like to believe. (I am a linguist.)
In many ways, English is quite simple. For example, our word order is very straightforward. I work with a language were the following is a normal sentence: "This is city New called York here." (This city here is called New York.) In fact, almost every permutation of those words would be valid without a change in the basic meaning (as long as "is" is the second word). This is a so-called non-configurational [wikipedia.org] language. Parsing English is easy by comparison.
I work with another language were there is a slight stress difference between the sentences "That might be true" and "He's honestly picking his butt." The words "soup" and "shit" are differentiated by a 40-50% increase in the length of the last vowel. There is one word for both "blue" and "green", and another word for "yellow", "orange", and "brown".
As to the likelihood of this project succeeding anytime soon: Languages are often not directly translatable into each other. One language I work with has an entire part of speech I cannot adequately translate into English. I have to wave my hands and point to convey the same information in English.
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It isn't Mandarin, which I happen to be studying at the moment, since it the tone changes the meaning of individual words, not whole sentences.
The change in stress changes one word from a modal meaning "remote possibility" to a compound verb meaning "pick the butt". The adverb "honestly" and the verb "be true" are homophonous, and word order doesn't matter very much; thus, the ambiguity. This language is O'odham. The other language, the one that lets you split "compound words" is Serrano. Both are Uto-Az
Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
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Simulated telepathy. (Score:3, Interesting)
I was wondering how hard it would be to translate that into audible words and transmit them at a volume relative to distance from the receiver.
Then you could have a social experiment where a group of people live together for a period of time while equipped with these transceivers.
Could be a huge improvement (Score:2, Funny)
let me be the first to say: (Score:3, Funny)
Here's what you'll look like (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhys/260069248/ [flickr.com]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stasarama/245979951/ [flickr.com]
It's still a lab prototype of course, but a massively impressive one. I'm very pleased to see articulatory speech recognition (that's the main research area in this particular project, rather than the translation itself) get written up by the BBC.
Form factor (Score:2)
It's not so far off to think that it c
Measuring vs. Translation (Score:2)
Could this allow the mute to speak? (Score:3, Insightful)
Killer App (Score:3, Informative)
This should be *much* easier to do that the version that actually translates, and it would add nearly as much to quality of life of the user and everyone else in his environs.
"My hovercraft is full of eels" (Score:3, Funny)
Hungarian: Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant...do you waaaaaant...to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
Clerk: Here, I don't think you're using that thing right.
Hungarian: You great
poof. Clerk: That'll be six and six, please.
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"The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it."