'Tower of Babel' Translator Under Development 220
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."
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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Sweet. Nice guy.
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No doubt these dedicated tower builders would still have been trying to build their towers even given the supernaturally imposed communication difficulties so God hasn't in fact stopped anyone trying to do anything, he has just stopped them from succeeding which would suggest that it was the success of such an enterprise he was worried about rather tha
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He should have filed patents and brought patent infringement lawsuit like everyone else.
The Tower of Babel (Score:2, Insightful)
The God of the Bible would feel not threatened in the lea
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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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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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What about Esperanto?
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Ain't Going to Happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Language is complicated!
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He must know that language is more then just words, there is grammer to. Then there is a story line, context, etc. etc. Let alone the fact that most people don't finish their sentence when they are having a conversation (tape a conversation and check it).
And for those experts who said: it showed the technology was "within reach". Stop calling yoursel
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Ther si alos speeling (which you might want to work at improving, considering you misspelled two words under five letters each.)
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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.
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What if you don't want to understand a culture, just understand what someone's saying? Unless you're going to speak it for the rest of your life, learning a language is pointless, as you'll just forget it.
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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You make a really great point, but it's not entirely the one you were trying to make ;-)
In Canadian English(TM) "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are used interchangeably as well. "He was pissed" means both, though. And that, I think, is the massive stumbling block in any automatic translator: Language tends to be situationally dependent. If you go to your average Canadian and, with no context, say "Man, was Frank ever pissed last night", he'll likely assume that you meant drunk, because of th
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I think there are two types of people: Those that use language soely as a collection of sounds, and those who think about the actual meanings of the actual words they use.
I consider the first group to be, on average, dumber than the second. And they are the only ones who say "could care less." So, while you say they are used interchangably in the US, this is only done by th
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Moving in to homes destroyed the subtlety and beauty of cave-dwelling. I don't see you living in a cafe.
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Communication != understanding (Score:3, Interesting)
translation, diversity, understanding (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the problem is that understanding someone is far more than parsing the other's sentences. It's getting to the point where you understand what meaning the other intended to convey. That's here all this machine translation still fails (and probably will fail for a long time to come). Because for that you need a lot of backround knowledge, you actually have to attune yourself to the experiences, the culture of the other. And that is a large part of what is learnt in a foreign language course.
All this a
Re:Warnin', some Cussin' follows. (Score:2)
A good way to test this are jokes, because they are such a condensed way of cultural meaning.
Here's another good one: insults/cursewords.
English ones tend to be based around sex; eg. Go fuck yourself. Fuck off you stupid cocksucker, etc...
French ones involve the church and shit; eg. Chrisse de tabarnac osti (a particularly nasty curse phrase... guaranteed to turn heads even amongst rough company, literally translates to "Christ, tabernacle, host") or mange la marde mon osti de chien salle (again, a pre
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
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Unless you're a
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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 !
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Like almost everyone else who has said "...is not possible" before you throughout history, you are wrong.
Suppose there are a finite number of idiomatic phrases, and database space is cheap enough to be effectively free.
Someone could compile a database of all idiomatic phrases and simply map between them in any two languages.
I think the real reason translation hasn't taken off yet is because people keep trying to come up wiht better algorithms, when what they really
Re:Other Languages (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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This could be nice for the occasional trips to other countries or if you have some friends/relatives in another country where you for that sake don't want to learn their language. But in both these cases, you usually don't know their language today eithe
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I wouldn't worry about it. Our speech and phrasing ability, languages: they are not something you can isolate and reproduce in a program, without reproducing much of the rest of the intelligence of a human being.
Subtle phrasing, context.. We learn new ways to express ourselves all the time, and we can do so since we put what we hear to an intelligent analysis and processing. A compute
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This is "the context" of the language, the part of the language that can only be translated, if you have intimite first hand knowledge of the two languages you whish to translate between. Basically, you have to know what moves in a society to truely understand the language.
Learning a second language is one thing, using it and understanding "the context" is something else and I think that a maki
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Speech recognition for limited vocabularies has worked quite well for a long time, but quud quality real speech recognition is still over the horizon.I think this will go the same way.
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Which is unfortunate. As a trilingual person (I guess you could add a dozen or more if counted computer languages) I have gained quite a richness of life and human understanding from learning another's language. There are many idomatic expressions that may seem a little funny initially, but after some thought, really seem to make you look at the world in a different way.
For example, in the Mayan language K'ekchi' [wikipedia.org], the term "Ma cuan sa' a ch'ol xbanunquil _________?", literial translates to mean Is it in
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)
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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Exactly! Tons of information we convey is done outside of the language we use. Some of the things we have to "leave" English to convey are simple words in other languages. How can automatic machine translation possibly work when that is the case?
Italian? (Score:2, Funny)
Must be Italian?
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I'm pretty sure the second one is Chinese, from what I heard about it.
As for the first one, I don't know (Latin has this kind of property), but I'm quite surprised you could split up "New York"
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As for the first one, I don't know (Latin has this kind of property), but I'm quite surprised you could split up "New York"
They probably wouldn't do this becaus it is a name (novo Eboraco, btw), but in general adjectives can be separated from the word they refer to, to add some stress.
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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
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I did not know that some language would use a unique word for distinct colours.
Well, all languages do. The "red" of a rose and the "red" of a brick are quite distinct colors, but we just call them "red". There are languages that make fundamental distinctions we do not in English. Really, it's all just wavelengths hitting our eyes. Different cultures have different ways of organizing that data.
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Are you referring to Warlpiri and its sign language?
I do all my work on languages of North America. Mostly, Southern California and Arizona, though I've dabbled in a language from Mexico and one from Oklahoma.
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Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
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Or daylight to people work with them.
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.
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Adding the translation step (which is doomed to be not much better than using a guide book to translate, given current levels of translation kno
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I'd have thought though that use of HMMs or alternate approaches is orthoganal to what features (articulatory vs cepstra, etc) are being used.. is it really HMMs themselves that she's panning?
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.
Computer translators will never work, unless... (Score:2)
Translation is not a matter of algorithm, but a matter of data.
Sub Vocalized speech? (Score:2)
(he muttered)...
Why try to run before you can walk? (Score:2)
-Nano.
"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.
Rots o' ruck! (Score:2)
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Management speak (Score:2)
"It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer." -> "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful."
Oblig. Python (Score:2)
of promise (Score:2)
IAAEM (Score:2)
There are a few scary things about this, one we all learn the same language this will drastically affect the number of perspectives in the world.
While you may disagree I have a quote that can help explain one of my English Prof's said "The Most Important word in any language is representation."
Another scary thought is that people won't need to learn any form of common language, if this technology gets sufficiently advanced it could literally allow each person to have their own la
Good News! (Score:2)
Bruce
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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."
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Well, except... (Score:2)