Wearable Translator to Debut at Comdex 93
quiller writes "Via is supposed to have a wearable PC that will take your voice, translate to seven different languages, and output the translated words through a speaker. Looks like something I want to look at while I'm there. " It will allegedly be showing at Lernout & Hauspie's booth, as it uses their translaton engine. The current specs have Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and
Spanish in the box. I think I'd need one - I'd feel so Arthur Dent.
Just a bit pricey, yes. (Score:1)
Storage and display choices. Is that really necessary? A simple LCD and a couple of RAM cards should be enough. But, what I want to know: is this thing real-time, or is there some (significant) delay in translation time?
Universal Translator, meet the 20th Century.
Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:2)
Does anyone know if there is a site that keeps track of sci-fi items that have become reality?
Godzirra! (Score:2)
No one's voice syncing with their mouths would be very disconcerting. Too bad it doesn't do like the trek Universal Translator and change the apperance of their mouths to match.
Accuracy and vocabulary... (Score:1)
How extensive are the dictionaries?
I haven't seen many impressive systems to translate text, let alone voice, so I am a little skeptical...
Bablephish online. (Score:1)
"I was pissing by the door and I heard a strange nuzze".
( Alo Alo for the humor impaird )
Diplomatic incident waiting to happen! (Score:4)
Man walking down a street of Beijing: "I like the flawless beauty of the streets!"
Translator: The virginity of these pretty [women] turns me on in the road!"
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
I wonder how it would translate... (Score:1)
(For those who don't know or forgot, follow this Slashdot link. [slashdot.org]
-m
Re:Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:1)
how far back do you want to go? Jules Verne (submarines and flight), Leonardo DaVinci (tanks and helicopters) or even Nostradamus (sp?)
I think this would be a great idea, but only if weighed in at the same time with all their ideas that never came about... sort of a shopping list. :)
To whoever gets a chance to try these... (Score:3)
Re:So what will it look like? (Score:1)
Now, how do you suppose it would translate that phrase? It is totally appropriate and polite when referring to the appearance of universal translators.
I'd like a shoe with cheese on it... (Score:1)
- -Steve Martin, commenting on speaking French badly
If I used one of these, I'd want to know enough of the destination language to "sanity check" its output.Can't be worse than... (Score:3)
Ummm, anyone bite the wax tadpole lately?
Re:Just a bit pricey, yes. (Score:1)
Note: I said second language - I'm not advocating replacing anyones precious national language.
several problems (Score:1)
However, if I could afford one of these, I suppose it would be better and faster than getting a pocket translator, typing in a phrase, and trying to pronounce the output.
Of course, you DO have to have faith... (Score:2)
"In this phrasebook, you have the Bulgarian expression 'Which way to the train station' translated as 'Please fondle my buttocks'...."
Most important translation missing (Score:2)
On second thought, maybe you just turn it off the get the translation.
The true test.. (Score:3)
- Listen to a human
- Output to another language.
- Have another device listen to that output,
- Output back to the original language.
(In other words, box -i english -o mandarin < english.au | box -i mandarin -o english > english2.au) Only then will I be convinced that this isn't crap-joev
Not gonna replace the babel fish just yet... (Score:3)
I think not!!!
I can't see this catching on.. (Score:1)
Re:Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:2)
You could go as far back as the Bible, if you wanted. In the book of Acts, on the Day of Pentecost, St. Peter et al were speaking in their own language and their words were perfectly understandable to "all in their own tongue". But that one's usually chalked up to "Cool Miracle", not "Cool Technology" status.
Won't work, I'd prefer assistance (Score:3)
I'd prefer a system that assists me with speaking a second language. Something where I can be talking to someone, forget a word, hit a button on the Language eCoach(tm), say "you're welcome, in japanese" and hear "dou itashimashite" in a earphone. Or, someone says something I don't understand, so I repeat it to the translator and it gives me the english.
With such a device, it would be possible to have a conversation in a foreign language after about 80 hours of instruction, because you don't have to memorize heavy vocabulary. It would also make the learning itself easier, because you don't have to waste time looking stuff up in the dictionary.
If the translation was imperfect, it wouldn't matter so much. Maybe it'd give me different options, like if I say "bank, in german", it would say "with money, Bank, with river, Strand", and give the user the option of saying whatever is right. Babelfish translates "I went down to the bank" as "Ich ging unten zur Bank", which may or may not be what I meant.
Re:Of course, you DO have to have faith... (Score:1)
ViA's Website (Score:2)
Am hoping to be... (Score:2)
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Re:Translation: (Score:1)
Interesting... (Score:1)
Something to think about.
esperanto. (Score:1)
English -to- Esperanto -to- french
and the other person speak french,
have one use a
English -to- Esperanto (or visa-vis)
and the other a
French -to- Esperanto (or visa-vis).
that would seem to simplify things. or am i just out of my knowladge league?
Re:Won't work, I'd prefer assistance (Score:1)
Accuracy is another matter though. Even so I think it would be a cool thing for someone trying to learn a language.
Seems Superficial to this Linguist (Score:3)
When I've translated or interpreted (translation=written documents, interpreting=spoken in real-time), most of the time both of the parties have only a 75% clue as to what actually happened. They miss out on the connotation of the words, the hidden meanings that are derived from culture. In these cases, only the translator knows 100% of the transaction.
For example, "Perestrojka" is the restructuring of the Soviet government during the Gorbachev era, but it comes from the roots "pere" or repeating action, again, and "strojit" or building, erecting, organizing. It's not just a political process, it's also what happens after an earthquake, and what I would call the Post-Civil-War Reconstruction if I had to talk about it in Russian. So, to an American, it is the policy of restructuring the government, but to me, it means a broad revolution of culture, ideas, and politics.
Point being, that would be lost in an electronic translator. There are many concepts that don't translate no matter how hard you crunch code. You have to feel them.
As Americans, we have this belief that everybody should learn English to talk to us. There's a joke in Linguist circles, "what do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person that can speak three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person that can speak one language? American."
Europeans have great language programs for school children, and it is no big deal for someone to learn Italian just because they are going on a vacation to Italy.
If you want to go to a different country and buy souvenirs, get an electronic translator. If you want to bridge cultures, learn a language.
I want two of 'em to set up a feed back loop (Score:2)
I want 2 of 'em and start 'em off translating back & forth in a feedback loop, as in the two famous examples:
input: "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" -> russian -> back to english -> "the vodka is good but the meat is rotton"
input: "out of sight, out of mind" -> russian -> back to english -> "blind idiot"
etc.
History of Taiwan and Japan (Score:1)
Okay, back on topic: I really want to check this thing out at Comdex and see how good it's Chinese translation is!!
excellent boot on the subject of translation (Score:1)
This book talks some about machine translation, but mostly about translation in general. Highly recommended to anybody interested in languages & translation.
Absolutely pointless... (Score:1)
Until then, I cannot envision myself purchasing one
Borkify (Score:1)
Company meetings would suddenly be a source of amusement.
Translation Feedback? (Score:1)
Device 1: English->LanguageX
Device 2: LanguageX->English
How many times through the feedback loop do you think it would take for the output to become totally incomprehensible in either langauge???
Anyone going to Comdex? Try it!!!
Re:To whoever gets a chance to try these... (Score:2)
Re:Accuracy and vocabulary... (Score:1)
Still. First step! Ya' have to step somewhere to get anywhere.
ROFL (Score:1)
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Re:Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:1)
Re:Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:1)
Micah McCurdy
L & H has cool toys.. (Score:2)
Their Voice recognition is pretty decent, but I haven't played around with it enough to figure out how to add workds. I was up and runniing with the Voice Rec. software in about 20 minutes. 7 minutes install, 13 minutes Recognition testing... or whatever they call it 'signing in' I think.
I've used the program while on irc some, and while dictating some documents. It's all windows based, but they have made some serious strides. I like it. They're promising Mac versions of things soon, but had no plans for linux, (at the time I talked to them).
Some other things we talked about are covered in a non-disclosure, so I can't mention those... sorry.
They're cool people... and their marketing drones are freindly, relatively technically savvy people.
yacko
Re:Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:2)
Re:esperanto. (Score:1)
Re:excellent wedsipe on the subject of translation (Score:1)
Might I suggest this translation resource? Site O' Joel [geocities.com] is a good place to translate to/from just about any language (no Somoli or Malay just yet), but it is geared toward English speakers. Oh, and its just a links page to lots of online resources, etc., but its a good starting place. Don't forget to check out the world's first ever English to Canadian [geocities.com] translator while you're there.
Re:Just a bit pricey, yes. (Score:1)
Why Americans are aggressively monolingual (Score:4)
Clearly geography is part of the answer, European countries are much smaller and more integrated with their neighbors than the US. Near the US/Mexico border, there are a large number of English speaking people that speak at least enough Spanish to conduct a simple consumer transaction. As you note, the only good way of learning a language is by being immersed in the language and culture.
Dominance is another part of the answer. In a world that is dominated by English speaking powers, particularily in economics and entertainment, most people an English speaker interacts with will have a working command of English. I suspect that when French (the original lingua franca) was dominant in diplomatic circles, that there was a similar lassitude on the part of French speakers.
However, neither of these factors explain the aggressiveness with which Americans are monolingual. In California, where there is a large population of native Spanish speakers, bilinugal education has been banned in public schools. Elsewhere, language education for childern is half-hearted at best, if it exists at all. As one of my Spanish professors told me, the stated purpose of most elementary foreign language education in the US is to assist in the teaching of English grammar and vocabulary, not to teach for fluency.
I think that the reason for the resistance to language education comes down to xenophobia and racism. Americans fear cultural encroachment, particularily by an increasingly large hispanic population. (This is of course ironic considering the cultural encroachment on the rest of the world by American culture, but Americans, as a rule, are poor connoisseurs of irony). Language is a particularly feared element of this cultural encroachment since language is so central to culture, and conversely a shared language connotes a certain degree of shared culture. There is of course a large measure of racism encapsulated in this fear. If Americans did not feel that immigrants were inferior, we would welcome their cultural and linguistic contributions.
As with any prejudice, there are legitimate fears as well as ignorant ones. Since preserving language is essential for preserving culture, a multi-lingual society is a more multi-cultural one, and multi-cultural societies, notwithstanding their benefits, are more suceptible to internal conflict.
In the midst of all this racism, xenophobia, and legitimate desire for a unifying national identity, the majority opinion is that immigrants should assimilate and learn English. This opinion is in fact shared by many if not most immigrants. Unfortunately, in the push to teach everybody English we come to the idea that not only should all immigrants learn English, but that the whole world should learn English.
So what's the solution? I wish I knew. If you come up with a solution that doesn't involve a gun I'll vote for you.
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Re:Accuracy and vocabulary... (Score:1)
NIVRAM
Nitpick Re:Of course, you DO have to have faith... (Score:1)
But it was /Hungarian/, not Bulgarian.
"I wheel not by zis tobacconist, it is scratched!"
"Please föööndle my buttocks."
"Ah, yes. Two blocks down, and left at the light."
And so on...
No! Don't click me! [surf.to]
Related Technology (Score:2)
s/tu// s/color/calor/ (Score:2)
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Re: Seems Superficial to this Linguist (Score:3)
I learned a foreign language in school. I found it to be a nearly complete waste of time. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Americans do not live in a place where they are exposed to non English speaking people. With the exception of some parts of Los Angeles and Miami (that most people would generally not consider desirable holiday destinations) English is the first language in the US. The geography of the US is the determinant here. With time and lack of use the hard won skills of speaking atrophy and are forgotten. Sure, there is some residual benefit, but without practice the skills are lost, and surprisingly quickly.
If I lived in Europe or some other part of the world where I was exposed to people whose native language was not English as a matter of routine, I am sure I would have found it worthwhile to develop my linguistic skills further. But the fact of the matter is that I, like almost all Americans just do not find exposure to other languages a part of daily life.
Americans are mono-lingual for the sole reason that there are very few times in their life where another language would be useful. If the US were parceled up into a bunch of states where each state spoke a different language, you can bet that there would be a lot more interest in being polylingual. But it just isn't so. We aren't like Europe where a large country (say France) is the size of one of our states.
The concept that all Americans believing that others should learn English to speak to us is ridiculous. First it is a stupid stereotype, and second it ignores that it is just a fact that most Americans know only English because they rarely meet people who are not native English speakers.
You are fluent in Russian. Fine. Do you know how many people I have met in my life (I am 49) whose native language was Russian? One. An emigrant who was the fiance of a business acquaintance. How am I supposed to justify spending years of my life learning a skill that would be used maybe for 3 hours over the course of my life?
In Europe you may learn Italian (or at least enough to perform the daily tasks) if you plan to visit Italy on vacation. But after having made the effort you have a skill that you can use frequently. Going to Italy is a two hour drive, which you may do every third summer. You may in fact meet visiting Italians frequently in your home city. How many Americans visit Italy on a frequent basis? Not many. Have you ever met an Italian tourist in the US? I haven't. Ditto German. If you go stand on line in the Louvre you are likely to meet more Germans than French. Go stand in line at the MFA in Boston and you find that there are few tourists from other countries.
It just does not pay for most Americans to become fluent in other languages. If they make the effort they usually find that they never have a chance to use the skills and find that they have wasted their time.
What I want to know is how many Europeans speak non-European languages. Geographically it is no different for a European to be ignorant of Persian than it is for an American to be ignorant of German. I would bet that the answer is that there are no more Europeans that speak Persian than there are Americans.
As far as mechanical translators being useless, well I will agree that in their current incarnation they are in fact useless. But then again people never thought that it would be possible to build a machine that could beat the world champion at chess, either. Who knows what the future of mechanical translation is? Another decade or two of Moore's law and careful programming and you might find that the issues of idiom and context are solved.
Re:Why Americans are aggressively monolingual (Score:1)
> Spanish speakers, bilinugal education has been > banned in public schools. Elsewhere, language
> education for childern is half-hearted at best, > if it exists at all.
In part that's because so called 'bilingual' classes in some areas (not all of them) were never getting around to teaching children english at all, leaving the kids at a major disadvantage after they left school.
Not to say that all bilingual education is bad, but in this case, there was a reason behind the 'ban'.
> As one of my Spanish professors told me, the > stated purpose of most elementary foreign > language education in the US is to assist in > the teaching of English grammar and vocabulary, > not to teach for fluency.
This is true. More, all my school-language (latin, german and japanese) classes put a lot more emphasis on grammer than was useful, if I just wnated to *speak* the language (well, with latin maybe this is not as much of a concern) -- OTOH, I just took a japanese class that emphasized *communication* over technical correctness, and discovered that I *can* learn another language (for a long tiem I just thought I was a complete idiot with languages or something, because remembering stuff by rote does not come easily to me)
Re:Just a bit pricey, yes. (Score:1)
Bradley
What they didn't tell you... (Score:2)
"The worst part is the number of Stephen Hawking prank calls will rise exponentialy."
Re:Just a bit pricey, yes. (Score:1)
Ghoti, et al (Score:1)
Not quite. Pronounce the 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women', 'ti' as in 'nation'.
Incidentally, one of the first things I tried when I got S.A.M. (Software-Automated Mouth) for ye old Commodore 64 was 'ghoti', which it pronounced 'gosh'.
Also incidentally, I think one of the words listed is misspelled. 'floccinaucinihilipilification', the act of judging a bit of information to be utterly worthless, according to the (dis)honorable Cecil Adams in _More of the Straight Dope_.
Re:Ghoti, et al (Score:1)
anyone else remember something like this? fantastic work by the coder anyway.
Re:The true test.. (Score:1)
last year I thought it'd be fun to test some text-to-speech systems by sticking the output through a speech recogniser, and comparing to the original input.
needless to say there's still a lot of work to do on TTS
Star Trek (Score:1)
but.... (Score:1)
No one's asking the real question... (Score:1)
"Would you like to play a game?"
Re:Accuracy and vocabulary... (Score:2)
Natural language processing is not advanced enough to produce any kind of real-world acceptable translation. Especially when we are talking about realtime voice recognition + translation stuff.
BTW, I'm a linguistics grad student. Not that that makes me be right in anything I say above, but at least I'm not speaking out of gross ignorance.
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Re:What should the Meta-language be? (Score:1)
Well, this is either trivially true or patently false, depending on what you meant with "language". If you mean something similar to a natural language (like Esperanto as you suggest below) then it is false. You know, parsing and interpreting a sentence in a natural language (a task that no one knows how to do as of now) is more than complicated enough of a task; if you have managed todo this, you obviously want to store the information in some "language" that's easy to decode.
Schematically, what a translator should do is parse natural language utterances, derive from them semantic representations, and then generate from those as semantically close as feasible utterances in the target language.
What a "semantic representation" should precisely look like no one knows; there is really A LOT involved in it. Pick up an introductory textbook in Semantics and Pragmatics (like Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, Meaning and Grammar, 1990) and look through it to get an idea.
The short story is that a semantic representation for a sentence has to include tons of stuff that might not be present in the sentence itself. For a very simple example, the English sentence "I'm handsome" is lacking some information that its semantic representation should have; namely, whether the sentence should be intepreted as meaning "I'm handsome now" or as meaning "I'm always handsome". This can only be determined from context (what the hearer knows or can infer about the speaker). Yet if you cannot make a correct assumption as to which of these meanings to assign to particular utterance of this sentence, you cannot correctly translate it into Spanish. Because you have to choose between "Yo estoy guapo" and "Yo soy guapo". These sentences each correspond to one of the two possible meanings of "I'm old" mentioned above.
So what is that Meta-language, and can we figure out how to turn it into something that could be used as the universal language? Perhaps all communications should be translated into that on public channels.
Pure fiction. We simply don't know what a semantic representation looks like, but we do know that it is bound to be enormously complicated, too much for it to be useful (or for us to use it consciously with any significant skill, for that matter).
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Re:Sci-fi hits again..... (Score:1)
[stephenson]*mumbles something about it not being cool at all when virii hijack a religion*[/stephenson]
What, POT mode STILL eats tags? Grr...
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"HORSE."
Re: Seems Superficial to this Linguist (Score:1)
You'd be surprised. Europe is a pretty popular destination for political refugees from that region, so there's more exposure..
-John
Wearable Translator (Score:1)
Know both languages to judge machine translation (Score:1)
Will they be taken seriously? (Score:1)
Even if travellers use them, I doubt that they will be taken seriously. Can you imagine someone walking up to you with a little box, fumbling to make sure it hears him while he talks into it, then thrusting it at you for it to speak something that is more than likely SOMEWHAT recognizable as English (-or insert another language of preference here)? I would just laugh.
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Language (Score:1)
What I don't understand is: why is it so difficult to learn another language? I mean, isn't there a stat like only 10% of a language is used 90% of the time? And in all indo-european languages, like 9 out of that 10 percent is all the same. So why can't I learn French in 1 day? I'm trying to cram as many languages into my brain as I can (working on French, Hungarian, and Latvian, wish me luck), and doing it without any formal instruction.
I came to France 6 months ago savoir _aucune_ de francais, and now I can almost speak it. I don't know if that's slow or fast, but why did it take me 6 months to learn the few hundred main words of this language?
If there are any linguist /. readers, please email me. This subject facinates me and I have no education on it.
-davek
Re:Ghoti, et al (Score:2)
Re:esperanto. (Score:1)
Better than 95%... (Score:1)
Check out the past story [slashdot.org] about the neural network that recognizes speech better than humans.
And on a similar subject, I think it'd be interesting to see neural networks applied to translation - they could possibly be trained to recognize idioms, produce more meaningful output, etc.
Why language learning is so slow (Score:1)
Doh!
Anyway, a large part of the answer is that you need to do more than just "learn" a few hundred words. You could probably memorize them in a week of concentrated study (or less). But that's not enough. You need to develop conditioned reflexes of associating the meaning with the sound (and vice versa) nearly instantly and unconsciously.
Developing conditioned reflexes takes a long time. Compare this with learning a martial art, or gymnastics, or learning dozens of complicated dance routines -- all of these examples could easily take 6 months or even years.
So we shouldn't be surprised at the length of time that it takes to develop really good conditioned reflexes in language, either.
(Pity no one will ever see this comment, since I'm posting 6 days after the discussion!)