The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
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Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#2Compare this line from the WSJ article:
> A decade from now, I would predict, everyone reading this article will be able to converse in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very concept of a language barrier.
with these excepts from The Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/10/texas-regi... (referenced two days ago on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11077168 ):
> Y'all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be slowly killing it
> Voice recognition tools such as Apple’s Siri still struggle to understand regional quirks and accents, and users are adapting the way they speak to compensate.
> ... “I’ve had a bunch of people from Australia and India say they only really get along with Siri if they fake an American accent,” said Lars Hinrichs, a sociolinguist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#3The benefits to this kind of thing are being able to be very specific and go deeper into the subject matter with one's second or third languages. Plus I might argue that smaller languages won't need to die (if everyone can get along and do business in their own tongue). The drawback is that perhaps people who learn languages in the near future will seem like those who study Latin ever since it became a "dead" language.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#4I've been learning Japanese as of late, and automated translation tools are near useless for anything but sentences that are just a few words stringed together (and even then, nonsense is often returned as soon as a tiny bit of slang or metaphorical language is used). I also have friends who speak languages that are not part of the top 10 most spoken in the world (eg Finnish, Hungarian, etc) and trying to translate their Facebook statuses returns complete garbage.
Between languages that are fairly close to one another (such as French and Spanish), sure - you can pipe text from one language to another in Google Translate and the results will be mostly understandable (although still very awkward). But anything else, and automated translation still has ways to go. Turns of phrases, idioms, general syntax etc. are fairly similar between languages that are closely related, so automated translation has an easy job there (with the caveat that it starts falling apart as soon as slang or more colloquial expressions are used). But step any further than that, and it's a lost cause.
The article also assumes that there's a 1:1 mapping between everything you can express in every language, and that it's just a matter of software finding the right mapping for whatever you're saying into the destination language. But any translator will tell you that this couldn't be further from the truth - there are many things I can say in English to my Californian friends that don't really work in a French conversation with my Parisian friends (let alone in Mandarin or Japanese). At best you'll be met with blank stares, and at worst you'll be breaking etiquette in major ways. Part of learning a new language is learning the space of what can be expressed and how in that language.
For these reasons, I don't really buy the whole "earpiece that automagically lets you speak with anyone in the world" anytime in the next few decades. Which is fine, because learning languages is fun :)
On the other hand, I'm currently in the Netherlands for a conference, and everyone speaks flawless English. I've had a similar experience in Germany, Sweden, and a bunch of other countries (but not in my country of origin, France, where being terrible at English seems to be a point of pride). So maybe taking a page from their book when it comes to education is a better idea than waiting for technology to let us be lazy.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#5This article is BS. Machine translation has been improving but it's still nowhere close to being able to provide real-time translation of spoken languages, and I bet anything it won't be there after another decade. I know for a fact that Baidu is throwing lots of money and people at fundamental R&D in translating Asian languages, and it's no piece of cake.
As for "earpieces whispering nearly simultaneous translations", it would be a cool party trick but I doubt they'll work in real life.
These moonshot projects have been around for decades, and they make for some cool entertainment at conferences and demos in very tightly controlled settings. As for the predictions that "the software in the cloud connected to the earpiece in your ear will re-create the voice of the speaker", the author should take up writing bad science fiction.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#6Yet another journalist who doesn't understand how languages actually work.
Other languages aren't just "English with different words and syntax". A single word can have dozens of different meanings, the set of different meanings of a word needn't be the same across languages. And even if you know the context the meaning doesn't have to be unambiguous. A perfect translation would need to recognize plausible ambiguities and retain them across languages.
Language is not code. Language is an expression of thoughts in a form that builds upon vaguely defined tokens. It's amazing that human language communication works this well at all given how ambiguous and faulty it actually is in practice.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#7Compare this line from the WSJ article: > A decade from now, I would predict, everyone reading this article will be able to converse in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very concept of a language barrier. with these excepts from The Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/10/texas-regi... (referenced two days ago on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11077168 ): > Y'all have a T…
To be fair, having not tried Siri for a year or two, it has gotten much better at dealing with the Glasgow accent ; )
I recall around 2000 having to fake a US accent in order to get an airline's voice response system to put me through to a human.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#8"...in ten years time." To quote XKCD's translation (sic!), "we haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome." https://xkcd.com/678/
This is the same tired old story that keeps on making rounds for the sixth decade now - "machine translation kind of sucks now, but it will be solved within the next decade!!!!!!!!1!" This is still very much a current paper - note the publication date: http://www.mt-archive.info/Bar-Hillel-1951.pdf
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#9I'm currently living in a country where I don't speak the language. I can't believe how incredible translation tools are. Even though I don't understand when people speak to me, I can write and read emails, and accomplish things that would be incredibly more difficult without this ability (e.g. talking to my insurance agent). And when I say I can read and write emails, I mean it can do so in about 1.5x longer than a native one. I have developed very basic abilities in the language (in the 2 months I've been here), and so I constantly use translation tools and check in both directions -- translate to the language, modify it to make sense according to my understanding -- translate it back to English -- all within the space of a couple of minutes.
I still miss out on learning more idiomatic expressions, but I imagine those will come in time. In the meantime, I am able to get a surprising amount of business done, in ways that would have been impossible before.
Not to mention that continuously doing all this translation of my written communications is making me learn the spoken language much faster. Although, for that, nothing replaces actually speaking with people, of course! ;) But it's much easier to bootstrap actual conversation when you've been learning individual words by reading and writing.
Overall I would say that automatic translation tools have made it possible for my life to move in directions that where language would have been a serious roadblock in a previous era.
Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
#10I've been learning Japanese as of late, and automated translation tools are near useless for anything but sentences that are just a few words stringed together (and even then, nonsense is often returned as soon as a tiny bit of slang or metaphorical language is used). I also have friends who speak languages that are not part of the top 10 most spoken in the world (eg Finnish, Hungarian, etc) and trying to translate t…
Exactly. I've been taking Japanese recently, too, and the grammatical structure of the language alone is enough to show that the "real-time whispering earpiece" as an impossible concept: in English, the verb usually comes near the beginning of a sentence. In Japanese, it's near (or at) the end. Translating one language to the other therefore requires a mental "tape delay", while you map the one grammar onto the other.
Even when you hear bilingual, fluent translators converting Japanese to English, there's often a weird disassociation between the words the speaker is using and the words coming out of the translator. The translator is buffering the words and translating in logical units. Even if you grant the benefit of the doubt and call this "real time" translation, I know of know translation system that is capable of any sort of similar kind of judgment with an unbounded input stream. Deciding where to begin/end translation requires knowing what the original sentence intended to express. And computers still suck at that.