Where is my Universal Translator?

In 1999 I bought a new computer and it came with a copy of IBM naturally speaking software...

I sat and for 4 hours read into the microphone, so it could learn my voice...

I did not realise that a dog barking, me clearing my throat, sniffing, a sneeze, saying "errrrrm", a cough etc... could have produced such a wonderful screen full of rubbish!!!

I haven't heard much more about voice recognition since that painful (waste of time) experience!!

John.

Where is my Universal Translator?

Muggabooga yama yama.

Could it just be that it is extrordinarily difficult? Yet each year great strides are being made toward that goal but it remains elusive. OCR is still struggling to achieve text that doesn't have to be proofread, and the spoken word is full of nuances and meanings derived from context that computers have a very hard time dealing with, even in one language let alone translating into another.

But wait! They did develop a Universal Translator that was flawless, some years ago .... I saw it on tv ... they used it for the Star Trek show! Some big company must be keeping it off the market. To them I say: "TRANSLATE THIS!"

I wish we had it here for some of the question posts.

Translation is part of the 'information economy', and until the next special economy comes along it is illegal to replace the people who perform those functions with machines.

While you can turn the spoken word into text, well sort of, a dictionary can translate these words from one language to another and finally you can turn text into speech translating from one language to another involves a thing call comprehension, something that computers are completely woeful at.

To translate from one language to another you need to comprehend what a person is talking about and this is more complex than just the meaning of each individual word. Just look at the number of ways in English you can say something like

The cat sat on the mat. The feline sat on the carpet. The cat lay on the rug. A kitten lay on the floor covering. A kitten curled up on the carpeting. The rug had a cat sitting on it. Upon the mat a cat did sit. etc

Well you get the picture, and that's the problem you do get the picture and the computer doesn't.. To a computer each one is a unique statement but to you they mean pretty much the same thing. In fact we actually go out of our way to avoid repetition and will deliberately change a word in a adjacent phrases to avoid repetition. Computers like consistency and repetition, that's just the way they are built.

Unless you can understand and comprehend the meaning the only way to translate is to have a list of every possible phrases and all it variations in every language with links between the meanings. While this can be done on a limited basis it is impossible to do on a universal basis so that brings us back to that ethereal concept of comprehension.

It would probably be easer to teach everybody a special language that could be used to instruct computers in the meaning of what you were trying to convey and then letting it translate that into all the other languages. But if everybody knew the language why would you use a computer since everybody could understand what you were saying. By the way the idea of a universal language has already been tried and it failed miserably.

How's that for an answer Roger?

That's a good point. I guess there would be problems of context as well. It just seems to me something rudimentary would be better than nothing. It must be very difficult to:

1. Hear what's being said (ignoring ambient noise)
2. Translating the phrase catching the grammar nuances (The point about our tendency of not repeating a word or phrase in consecutive sentences is a good one. I was taught this in school and its almost obsessive)
3. Understanding the context (Which Witch is Which, They're over there in their car)

Too bad. I'd rather have that than a camera phone.

You also have words that have context sensitive meanings like cook, fly, fish etc. Then there is the punctuation and inflections that can completely change the meaning of a sentence like

What's that on the road ahead?

and

What's that on the road, a head?

A tiny difference in the pronunciation gives a completely different interpretation. Somehow I think it's going to need a quantum leap in computer performance before we se a universal translator. Interestingly though it probably wont be the memory capacity that needs to improve but rather the fundamental structure of the CPU.

I have a feeling that the answer lies in a complex network of millions on small processor chips connected in a very complex way sort of like a neural network but with more complex junctures.

The idea behind it is that the way to interpret a sentence is dependant on the path the logic takes through the network to get to a particular junction. There are numerous paths that can get you to a particular juncture in a similar way that there are a myriad of ways to express a concept. For this to be possible however its going to take a complete rethink of the way we build CPUs

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean - nothing more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

-- Lewis Carroll

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The 500 most frequently-used words in the English language have, on average, 23 meanings each. The word "round" has 70 distinctly different meanings.

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"We now have dress shirts on sale for men with 16 necks"

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"I saw a man on a hill with a telescope."

1) Looking through a telescope myself, I saw a man on a hill.

2) I saw a man on a hill who was himself attended by a telescope.

3) I saw a man on a hill, and also on the hill I saw a telescope.

4) I was on the hill myself, using the telescope, when I saw a man.

5) I was on the hill myself, when I saw a man attended by a telescope.

------------

Can cans can cans?

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Years ago an English:German translation program was tested with the phrase (from NT Matthew 26:41) "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," which the program happily translated to German and back again to English. The result?

"The wine is good, but the meat is rotten."

-----------

Lets face it, English is a stupid language.
There is no egg in the eggplant.
No ham in the hamburger.
And neither pine nor apple in the pineapple.
English muffins were not invented in England.
French fries were not invented in France.

We sometimes take English for granted.
But if we examine its paradoxes--
We find that quicksand takes you down slowly.
Boxing rings are square.
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

If writers write, how come fingers don't fing?
If the plural of tooth is teeth,
shouldn't the plural of phone booth be phone beeth?
If the teacher taught,
Why didn't the preacher praught?

If a vegetarian eats vegetables
What does a humanitarian eat!?
Why do people recite at a play
Yet play at a recital?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy
Of a language where a house can burn up as
It burns down
And you fill in a form
By filling it out
And a bell is only heard once it goes!

English was invented by people, not computers
And it reflects the creativity of the human race
(Which of course isn't a race at all)

That is why:
When the stars are out they are visible.
But when the lights are out they are invisible.
And why it is that when I wind up my watch
it starts,
but when I wind up this poem,
it ends?

------------------

We must polish the Polish furniture.

He could lead if he would get the lead out.

The farm was used to produce produce.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

The soldier decided to desert in the desert.

This was a good time to present the present.

A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

I did not object to the object.

The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

The bandage was wound around the wound.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

They were too close to the door to close it.

The buck does funny things when the does are present.

They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line.

To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

After a number of injections my jaw got number.

Upon seeing the tear in my clothes I shed a tear.

I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Hi Masu,

A complex problem language translators will need to solve is that of context. And in order to understand context, translators will need an extensive and fundamental understanding of how the world works in a common-sense sort of way.

As a specific example, once a person dies he/she stays dead, unless one is talking about resurrection in the Christian sense (translators will need to understand that, too) or about reincarnation and other religions' come-back-alive concepts, and so forth. But, say, when a bug dies, it stays dead and will not be resurrected in the Christian sense. In some Asian religions the bug might very well be an incarnation of some poor sod's ancestor? A translator will need to know about that, too, and will likely need to infer this from the surrounding context even if it is not explicitly stated.

Some years ago there was an ongoing, very ambitious project to develop an expert system which "understood" such common-sense knowledge. I haven't heard much about the project since, and at the time a surprising number of folks in the A.I. community expressed doubts about its chances for success. If I could only remember the project's name I might google it to learn more (someone help me out here). For my part, I found the whole idea fascinating as such a system would necessarily be a precursor to the development of an effective "universal" translator.

For anyone interested in Computational Linguistics, I highly recommend "The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge" by MIT professor Robert Berwick. The book is a bit dated, but the concepts it elucidates still apply. Years ago I wrote a variant of the famous "Eliza" program which acts as a Rogerian psychiatrist. A big challenge was making the program identify the correct subject/object referred to by a pronoun. Natural-language-understanding programs are notoriously complex and depend on much more than sentence processing. Writing my program taught me a helluva lot about the difficulties of language processing - and of my own native language!

I might add that my particular program gossiped about previous "patients" and became quite insulting if the patient became belligerant. It was fun to watch people converse with it. Some of them took it quite seriously (especially those with little or no understanding of computers and their limitations), and would spill their guts out to the machine.

My two cents' worth.

-e

Its surprising how easy it is to trick people into thinking there is some sort of intelligence in a machine. Some years back I got hold of an IO card for a PC that could monitor a handful of inputs. I wired it up to things like the front gate and doorbell and wrote a program that used a sound card and text to speech program the verbally annunciate an event.

The initial program said the same thing all the time so with the second version I made up a frustration factor that would make the machine sound more and more sarcastic if the same event kept repeating. It surprised me how people would react to the changing response of the machine and it wasn't long before you would hear people responding to the annunciation of an event with statements like;

"Gee, you got out of the wring side of the bed"

"And what's got up your nose"

It confused the living daylights out of the two Doberman woofers that we had at the time.

I eventually wrote an alarm clock program that used the motion detectors from the burglar alarm to see if you actually had decided to get out of bed. It would politely announce that it was time to arise then with ever increasing levels of irritation nag you every 5 minutes till it saw you moving about the house. It worked really well at getting you up in the morning but my wife threatened to attack it with a sledge hammer if I didn't calm it down.

There was only one possible name for a system like this and the only thing that disappointed me is that I never managed to get a text to speech program that sounded like its namesake from the movie 2001.

Hi Masu!

I just now (Friday, January 26, 2007, 12:00:30 US Central Time) read your post. I'm subscribed to this thread - and a number of others - but, for some reason, I've not received notifications of new posts except from one or two other threads.

Your doorbell and alarm sound pretty cool!

-e

Yes I have too noticed this problem, it can be a real pain.

The universal language that was "tried" at one point was "Esperanto". Its adoption was a favorite of "one world" intellectuals for a time and was also I believe, sanctioned by the UN. But therein lay its failure .. you can't impose something like a language from the top down (without the use of force that is).

For all its quirks, the language that probably stands the best chance of becoming "universal" is some variant of english or "american". In its favor is its widespread international use and/or requirement for a variety of applications (air traffic control is one) and the dynamic nature of its ability to incorporate both new words and words or terms from sub-cultures, other cultures or languages readily, and without bias. This makes it a language "of the people". It is also, word by word and term by term "infiltrating" other existing languages, and has been for some time. English language media is pervasive in the world. It is the "second language" of choice when learning a new language in most developed parts of the world.

Amazing when you consider that it all started from a small island nation with the torch passed to one of its former colonies.

Yes, English is the new Latin. In our Pax Americana, which seems to be just as bloody as Pax Romana, it pays to speak English. Its worth noting Latin is a dead language, though it did produce the romance languages.

English does seem to be the language of choice... However, its use and ease of learning is incredibly awkward...

I speak German as well as French (I'm English!!) and I have to say the easiest language to learn and use as well as being the most precise language is German, especially for technical topics.

As for the most common language I would have thought Chinese would be a forerunner with 1 billion (USA) speaking it...

Once again though, I did try learning Chinese 10 years ago and found it very difficult, also when I used it speaking Cantonese to a Mandarin speaking Chinese he couldn't understand a word I spoke!!!

John

For the record, I speak only English, though someday I'd like to be able to speak a couple more languages. Being able to speak three languages would be pretty cool.

As German and French are the main precursors to English, its not surprising you would say that the easiest to learn was German. Most Italians would tell you how easy it is to learn Spanish, and Nepalis of the ease of learning Hindi. I think the ease of learning a language has much less to do with the superior flexibility of the language as it does with the background of the person learning it. I doubt anyone from the mainland China that would find English, German, French, or any western language intuitive or easy.

Actually, there has been a lot of research that shows the cognitive development of the language centers of the brain differ for different languages and since most cognitive development occurs in our first 10 years, we are "hard-wired" to prefer certain languages, similar to our own. This can be overcome, but it takes work.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/102530887/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Spanish, he even easier...

The answer to the universal translator is learning more languages. It always amazes me how some individuals learn multitudes of languages. It would seem that learning two or three key additional languages would get you a long way about this globe.

As for English's universal nature, that is almost strictly due to business. It is the language of prosperity and anyone that wants to get on that bandwagon realizes the economy of becoming fluent with it.

Yes, English is a bear of a language to master. You need go no further than read emails and posts from Americans to walk away with the realization that English is a tough horse to ride. Sadly, many foreigners have a better command of our language than we do! Too bad we don't do a better job of getting to English class and learning two languages as a minimum. I hated English in school. When I took German as my second language I was refreshed because every letter in the alphabet had a unique pronunciation or if required a modifier like the umlaut to indicate how it was pronounced. Conversely, once you understood the alphabet you had a good chance of being able to correctly spell that word when you heard it spoken from the herd. With English you have little hope of doing that. Europium had performed an eloquent job pointing that out.

I submit to you that the universal translator may be a bad thing. First, it would be easy to misconstrue the meaning of what is spoken to you or to your guest. Wars have been started for lesser reasons. Second, it will further serve to isolate us from each other. How you ask? Once it becomes easy to communicate we will cease spending the effort to understand each other. The diversity of languages provides a unique opportunity to understand our neighbors. All we need to do is walk in their shoes for a mile (or 1.609 kilometers if you prefer) by learning their language, which leads us to better understanding their cultures, which deepens our appreciation of each other. Like travel, it will broaden our minds.

John: 11, 35.

Wouldst thou care to translate that?

Is the reference to John 11, 35

To me...?

Or to the bible or something??

John.

ElectroDude: If Guest meant "John 11:35," this is the chapter:verse of the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept."

As Guest's post does not sport an "In reply to #n" line, I'd say it's a reply to the original post. How it relates to anything on this thread is anyone's guess.

-e

Hi John, happy new year blah blah......Did you learn the German and french at a young age? I tried to learn German in my teens, no chance! I'm told I don't have the ideal learning process!? I think I'm a typical brit.

Has no one read Douglas Adams and engineered a Babel fish yet?

Ah the babel fish, the proof of the non existence of God!

Hi Plbmak, happy new wotsit to you etc...

I learned French in my teens and over in France I became fluent in it, but my German was a part of my Engineering degree course... Back in the 70's they seemed to think that to be an engineer you had to be taught all sorts of non-engineering stuff...

Very useful it has turned out to be as well!

Now now Masu, you know fully well that your comment will have the wrath of a whole continent on your head don't you?

John

I'm just quoting from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the galaxy. The argument goes something like this.

Man: The babel fish is mind bogglingly useful because if you stick one in your ear you can instantly understand every language in the universe.

God: I refuse to prove that I exist because proof would deny faith and without faith I am nothing.

Man: Ah but nothing so mind bogglingly useful as the babel fish could ever have evolved by itself, therefore you must have created. This proves that you must exist to have created it and therefore by your own argument you don't exist.

God: Oh, I never thought of that. Then promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

Man: That was easy.

Man promptly goes on to prove black is white and in doing so gets run over and killed on a pedestrian crossing.

As I have seen a transmission devoted to demonstrating that the humble banana is definitive proof of creationism, because of the way it perfectly fits the human hand, I'm not so sure that the logic behind the idea of the Babel fish being proof of the non existence of God would stand. Particularly as it caused more wars then being misunderstood had! I'm sure Douglas would have appreciated the irony.

I thought they did have them. Like the electronic dictionaries. I'm pretty sure they have them in other languages. It may not be a translator but it's as close as it will get. I suppose. Good idea though.

<33 Dont let my look fool you. I'm a genious..maybe<33

Hmmmm that's what I keep saying in the mirror each morning... doesn't work though...

John.

lol. Maybe it's the wrong kind of mirror?

That sounded stupid...never mind me, once again tonight i'm too tired to think.

Physgr180 wrote: "Maybe it's the wrong kind of mirror?"

-----

Cold Quantum Mirrors

-e

My mirror doesn't work properly, every time I look into it, I see a slightly portly guy in there! I must get a new one.

That was a fun thread, wasn't it?

This world could use a little more levity, IMHO.

-e

Like i said never mind me...