Pushbutton translation?
09/21/2007 @ 4:00 am
Fuji Xerox has developed a new photocopy machine that reportedly scans the contents of Japanese documents and translates them into Chinese, English, or Korean. Flip a switch and and it translates the other way.
Apparently, the copy machine can be networked to a Fuji Xerox translation server that does the actual brain work.
Though I earn my living as a translator, I have to admit that I still don’t feel very threatened by the current offerings on the machine translation market. I don’t think machine translation will be replacing human Japanese > English translators anytime soon.
Poor Mari….she’s my favorite. If I ever become a j-pop singer and part of the...
Shes definitely at the top of my hot list.
perfeckt 10:10
Yeah, the results of Babelfish, or any other “machine” translations are downright funny at best.
September 21st, 2007 at 5:09 amI was going to say, it sounds like we’ve found a way to pay for the sort of entertainment Babelfish can provide for free!
When I was working towards my linguistics degree, I considered going into computational linguistics and working on translation software, but I never liked programming all that much.
Linguistics is a relatively young field, though research has really taken off since the 70s. I don’t know if it’s possible to predict if/when machine translation will be possible. It almost seems like it would require AI. I’m no translator, and I’m not even fluent in another language, but I do know some Japanese, and when I’m listening to it and then trying to let my husband in on what’s going on, I get the comprehension in Japanese and then have to think about how to present it in a way that makes sense in English…and there are often cultural things to either overexplain or ignore, too. I’m not sure if translation software is sophisticated enough to handle stuff like that.
September 21st, 2007 at 5:52 amJP – I’d wait for the Hello Kitty version to come out. If that doesn’t sell this thing, *nothing* will
And I see we are being revisited by the only-slightly-less-creepy Ms. m_ki in the personals. She still looks either like jail bait or one of ‘those’ dolls but at least she’s not writing disturbing captions anymore (although the pose is just… gaaah).
September 21st, 2007 at 6:01 amA Hello Kitty translator! Cool! The world will become mired in kawaii-ness! Resistance is futile!
September 21st, 2007 at 6:32 amOnly if all the ‘i’s are dotted with Hello Kittys or hearts. I would love to read the Japanese Penal Code after it goes through this invention. Girlly giggggllleee… I typed ‘penal’… giggle.
September 21st, 2007 at 7:43 amSome pretty smart people think that competent machine translation will be with us within 10 years. As one said, “They used to say that AI was needed to beat a human at chess, or to do many things computers now do. Now that computers can do them, they are no longer considered AI.” I’m paraphrasing…
However, I think we are pretty safe from computers writing snappy copy for a while yet.
This machine is kind of pathetic, as it attempts to weld aging technologies with a yet non-existent technology. By the time we do have machine translation, this thing will be an antique.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:00 amBut in chess, the playing area and pieces are finite. The calculations are massive, but it all occurs within a defined space. I’d be amazed if a computer could ever handle the subtleties where concrete information is ‘missing’ – nuance, figurative phrasing, a spontaneously created euphemism or a veiled cultural reference – they’re all famously mangled.
I honestly think translation will only ever be a human capability. Having said that, we’ve come a long, long way, baby, so perhaps it’s foolish to rule anything out. I just think a computer will never be able to effectively handle the ‘infinite space’ of language. (Is it infinite, or is it just ‘very big’…?)
September 21st, 2007 at 8:33 amghoti, I’d appreciate it if you could tell us when that happens. I’d go out and get one, slap a Hello Krappy label on it, call it ‘George’ and let it ’speak’ for me and finally I’ll be able to figure out what I’m babbling about.
September 21st, 2007 at 10:16 amI earn some money off seasons as a part time scientific translator at home. I don’t think I can live as a full time translator because I lack the ability of translating precisely with certain speed.
Without any help of internet and translation software it would be too tough or almost impossible for me to do the job. I know personally two persons who work as translator and both are of the same opinion.
September 21st, 2007 at 10:54 amThough machine translation is having some success with some language pairs, it is hard to imagine that we will see a workable J>E machine language system that produces anything close to generally usable text anytime soon. Smart people say machine translation within 10 years? Could be, but who are these smart people? Translators? Translation consumers? Computer people? Futurologists? Are they talking about J>E translation?
The main problem with J>E is that English sentences require certain elements (subject, object, tense) that are not required in Japanese. That always has been the main problem with J>E. . .even for human translators. I worked on a machine language project back in the ’80s in which the main focus was tring to come up with the logic to deal with the subject/object/tense problem. (I also remember a guy, who considered himself to be a very smart person, telling me back in the ’90s that that J>E translators based in Japan were doomed because advances in the Internet “soon” would result in all such translation being done in India and China for pennies a page. . . I wonder whatever happened to him. . .)
That said, modern techology has shown us that something ain’t necessarily impossible just because it seems so today. No doubt there are plenty of unimaginable surprises coming down the pike at us as we speak.
Does computer techology currently have a role in translation today? Of course. Many (if not most) translation customers require use of a popular translation database application (TRADOS) that remembers everything you have translated in the past and makes suggestions for what you are translating today. Also, a translator needed to build a library of general and subject-specific dictionaries years ago, but today just about all the reference information you ever could need is nothing more than a Google away.
September 21st, 2007 at 12:05 pmAs someone with interest in both translation and AI, I have yet to see translation software with good enough output that any time was saved over doing the whole thing by hand from the beginning. However, I think programmers will get there with machine translation someday. “Within the decade” is too optimistic, I think. “By the end of the 21st century” is a safer bet.
September 21st, 2007 at 12:11 pmthis is all about “Adult-Speak”!..try talking to my Two Lads – they would drive that machine into Meltdown..even Arden cannot understand what Sammy & Tommy chatter on about.
*they-will-be-here-soon – Osa & Sto-chan*
long-live-Japundit.
remora……(*_*)
.
September 21st, 2007 at 1:03 pm..and if you doubt me on this – Sto-chan – is pretty Hip to both yooth-culture gaijin-wise and the alternative…
*a lot of things that have been posted here (kid-wise) he’s laughed at.*
rem.
September 21st, 2007 at 1:25 pmI am in the middle of a book that has changed my mind about this stuff. Nanofuture, by J. Storrs Hall, PhD. Published by Prometheus Books (now there’s a clue). Great reading about developing technologies.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:24 pm“translation being done in India and China for pennies a page.”
I priced some J>E Indian translators a few months back. They were surprisingly not all that cheap, and certainly not cheap enough to warrant sending work out to someone you cannot meet. So far as competent Chinese J>E translators, there are none, are there?
September 21st, 2007 at 9:34 pmAs I said, the guy was making a pitch and it was 20 years ago.
September 21st, 2007 at 10:05 pmIn my experience, the people who expect the most out of J>E machine translation, as well as the people who think that non-native English speakers (like Indians) are capable of producing adequate J>E translation, don’t know much about translation, the English language, the Japanese language, the relationship between Japanese and English, or all of the above. They generally are people who need to pay to have translation done, business types who are trying to sell some translation system, or computer people who believe that anything is possible as long as enough past data is available. The thing they all have in common is the impression that, if whacked with the proper tool, a Japanese (or English) expression or term will pop open neatly and reveal the corresponding English (or Japanese).
September 21st, 2007 at 10:43 pmI really would like one of those things to understand the japanese manuals, but it would be a dream if you could put mangas there and get them tranlated
September 22nd, 2007 at 7:44 amThen there are those areas where the author of the source language hasn’t clearly expressed himself, and the translator must either figure out what he wanted to say, or worse, write something to cover up that the original author had no idea what he wanted to say. Hard to imagine a machine doing that, as optimistic as I am about nanobots and such.
September 22nd, 2007 at 8:12 am