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The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

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Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#41

Post by resoluteteeth »

kazinator wrote: post #20

I suspect real-time machine translation is within reach if the speakers are trained to use a restricted subset of their native language. Moreover, I suspect that this approach could be both realistic and useful. This restricted subset situation is de facto already the case; existing tools don't handle regional dialects and colloquialisms. I just tried "嘘じゃねいぞ" (uso ja nei zo!) in Google Translate and it came up with…

> A restricted subset of your native language is something which you already understand, and learning to speak it is easier than a whole different language.

It's interesting to note that before machine translation, there have been attempts to try to standardize restricted subsets of English as a way of making it easier for non-native English speakers (for example "Basic English" and "Basic Global English").

However, I think both in the case of communication with non-native speakers and in the case of machine translation, it's actually not that easy for native speakers to anticipate what phrasings will be problematic.

These existing efforts have had the problem that reducing vocabulary can actually make the resulting language more reliant on things such as verb colocations that are actually harder for non-native speakers. Machine translation has an advantage that it can presumably understand a rich vocabulary, so it might be possible to get somewhat better results by using as precise words as possible while keeping the sentence structure simple. Still, especially with modern statistical machine translation, and perhaps even more so in the future with recurrent neural network-based translation, it may not be that easy to predict potential pitfalls in an attempt to work around them. It actually might have been easier to train people to get better results (at least for specific language pairs) with older, rule-based translation systems, since they were more predictable.

In either case, there presumably needs to be a certain level of accuracy before people can start attempting to tweak it by their choice of wording. I don't think we are there yet, especially for English Japanese. I just tried entering "I'm not going to tell him that." in Google translate, and it gave me "私は彼のことを言うつもりはありません。" ("I'm not going to mention him.") This is a fairly simple sentence, with no colloquialism, and yet Google Translate fails utterly. This is much more concerning than something that can be easily worked around, such as not knowing colloquialisms such as ”じゃねー".

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#42

Post by scarhill »

distances wrote: post #36
pmontra wrote: post #12

It must work offline. One of the reasons is that tourists often don't buy a data plan (imagine a tour of Europe with a different country every couple of days) and wifi is not where you might need machine translation most, on the road.

Many European mobile contracts allow a bucket of roaming data (400MB per month for me). Not sure what's the status for prepaid SIM cards that tourists from outside of Europe would likely have. Also, the roaming costs in EU are regulated, with likely price decreases also in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...

A number of prepaid providers are offering data roaming plans now. See this list: http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/European_Union

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#43

Post by hodwik »

euske wrote: post #39

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 i…

> (the idea that not knowing a language is acceptable)

It's not? I'm in big trouble. There are more than 6,000 languages I do not know.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#44

Post by Piskvorrr »

joakleaf wrote: post #38

I thought this was about how the entire world is getting to a point where they are able to speak and understand basic English. There are certainly countries and population groups that do not speak English well, but it has changed significantly the last 10 years. I wonder if we will get there before 100% accurate automatic translation.

The entire world*, sure.

(the part of it inside my social bubble; smartphone and internet connection strongly advised, other terms and conditions apply, void where prohibited.)

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#45

Post by pluma »

astrodust wrote: post #31
pluma wrote: post #6

Yet 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 ambiguitie…

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 exp…

Sure, but translations are lossy. No 1-to-1 translation can ever completely emulate perfect fluency.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#46

Post by caseysoftware »

euske wrote: post #39

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 i…

This. Two years ago I visited Paris for the first time. I knew four phrases: hello, please, thank you, and "my name is.." and I expected ridicule and people being rude to me left and right.

It turned out that attempting to be polite in French bought me enough good will and sympathy that I was able to communicate without getting rude looks or annoyed responses. I may have a different experience in the French countryside - less tourists, less patience? - but I was pleasantly surprised the whole time.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#47

Post by Piskvorrr »

hodwik wrote: post #43
euske wrote: post #39

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 i…

> (the idea that not knowing a language is acceptable) It's not? I'm in big trouble. There are more than 6,000 languages I do not know.

The point is probably "it's not acceptable to assume 'everyone knows English, but most are just too lazy to use it'" rather than "of course you're supposed to be fluent in any language" ;)

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#48

Post by Brakenshire »

astrodust wrote: post #25
korginator wrote: post #5

This 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 depends on what the bar for "good enough" and "fast enough" is. Remember that Google Translate, just one example, was pretty feeble to start but has proven itself to be adequate for most needs now even if a lot of the meaning gets lost in translation. Could that be paired up with Google Voice? Absolutely. It's not easy, but it's inevitable.

I wouldn't say there are that many situations where Google Translate is good enough, to be honest. It's not so different from an automatic way of looking words or phrases up in a dictionary.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#49

Post by ebiester »

korginator wrote: post #5

This 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…

I can't remember who said it, but someone said technology changes less in 1 year than anyone expects, but more in 10 years.

Translation, however, is a tricky bit. Due to the nature of the structure of language, it would have to be "say a sentence, wait, respond, wait" which would slow down the course of a conversation significantly.

I think you could get to usefulness for simple transactions today if you're google or apple for a romance language in a standard accent. You would probably have to download something beforehand to preload the soundex for that set of accents, but it's within the power of your phone to do so. You'd probably need the top 3000 words + food + touristic places + top 5000 idioms in a set of common accents for the region, but that's not too bad compared to talking about something like politics.

The top phones have the power to do that today.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#50

Post by Piskvorrr »

pluma wrote: post #45
astrodust wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

Sure, but translations are lossy. No 1-to-1 translation can ever completely emulate perfect fluency.

You can get pretty close though ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbflkF_1zY
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