The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

Even English isn't English as innuendo and alternate meanings cloud understanding of it constantly. Even the simple phrase "I'd hit that" means any number of things depending on the speaker and the context.

This doesn't even touch on how sometimes British English needs to be "translated" to American English, like in the case of Harry Potter being adapted with many words changed.

Likewise it's almost impossible to express the nuance of something like "that's so fucking fucked" in a language lacking a word of similar versatility.

I'd argue there's no such thing as a "perfect translation". That's why people who translate novels have a considerable amount of work to do to pick, from all possible translations, the one that best represents the tone and intent of the original author.

I still think it's possible to come up with a passable translation automatically in real-time. It's inevitable.

I live abroad and speak far from fluently in a foreign language. I'm personally invested in machine translation improving, and I really hope it does.

> Today’s translation tools were developed by computing more than a billion translations a day for over 200 million people. With the exponential growth in data, that number of translations will soon be made in an afternoon, then in an hour. The machines will grow exponentially more accurate and be able to parse the smallest detail. Whenever the machine translations get it wrong, users can flag the error—and that data, too, will be incorporated into future attempts.

If this is the reasoning that we will be there in 10 years, it is ridiculously optimistic. I'm pretty sure that there is a exponential fall off from common phrases to a long tail of more nuanced, not as often uttered language. A million people punching in "where is the bathroom?" is not going to make the machine know how to impart the acerbic wit of a phrase from a Palahniuk book to a Japanese business man. Good luck finding someone skilled enough in both languages and cultures to be able to correct the error.

Real skills in multiple languages requires an intellect to parse the situations. While I personally hope that will one day be achievable with AI, I have to think that we are still a long way off.

Google Translate can't handle even perfectly idiomatic Japanese. It's so bad I had to write my own translation aid software (shameless plug: http://ichi.moe).

For example, Google can't handle an extremely common Japanese word なんて. It translates it as "Nantes" (the city in France). Even though the city name would certainly be written in katakana and not hiragana.

真有意思。I see a lot of dismissals of the projections in this article. Thirty years ago, just as I was working for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter, I would have agreed with all those dismissals. I no longer agree. As some of the subcomments here have pointed out, all that automated translation and interpretation have to do is become less expensive than either a) learning the relevant language yourself or b) hiring good-quality human translators and interpreters. Automated translation and interpretation is already well along that path.

A crucial skill for a professional interpreter or a casual language-learner is "lexicalization," figuring out what the correct match is between what is possibly a phrase in one language but only a single morpheme that is part of a larger word in another language. But the huge advantage automated translation solutions have is shared learning and long-lasting memory. If the lexicalization is built into a database, for example a database kept by Apple, Google, IBM, or some other multinational provider of translation services, that learned information can be deployed in products over and over and over again. In the end, that's all that it takes for automated translation and interpretation to do better at equal cost (or as well at less cost) compared to human language-learning or human language services. I got out of interpreting for a living years ago, because I finally came around to the understanding of how little I could compete with the worldwide efforts made with new technology to tackle language problems. I still think learning natural modern human languages is a very intellectually enriching activity, and all my children do that, but we expect to live in a world a decade from now with very good real-time interpreting and translation systems for a wide variety of language pairings.

I think people are overestimating the word "language barrier". People often forget that the language barrier is not a one-sided problem. Communication is a collaborative effort (unless we're just spying them). I bet that something like keyword spotting for commonly used 3000 words is already pretty feasible, and that would greatly reduce the language barrier. Perfect translation is neither possible nor necessary to induce mutual effort.

(By the way, I've seen so many US tourists in Europe who don't even try to speak a single word in their language. They don't seem to know that a simple "thank you" in their native tongue would greatly reduce the barrier and change their sentiment towards the US. In this sense, I believe that technology is more or less neutral to mutual understanding, because not knowing a language (or the idea that not knowing a language is acceptable) can have adverse effects.)

Edit: a few grammatical errors. Damn my Japaneseness!