Japanese Scientists Make Automated Translation Break-Thru!

According to the Christian bible, God punished the small bands of people who professed to believe in him but nevertheless committed sins by decreeing that different groups of people would speak different languages. The idea being that if people could not communicate with each other they would sin less.    

Obviously, the God-plan didn’t work in Christian societies and just as obviously long before the appearance of god-based religions thousands of different languages had already developed among different groups of people.     

It goes without saying that these different languages did not reduce the irrational and violent behavior of the groups concerned. In fact, they created their own set of problems whenever these bands of people confronted each other.    

One of the primary reasons for the problems that different linguistic groups have is caused by the fact that languages are the reservoir, the transmitter, and the controller of cultures. People who speak different languages have problems because of the cultural content of certain key words in their languages    

It is easy to learn that water is agua (ah-gwah) in Spanish and mizu (mee-zoo) in Japanese. There is no cultural conflict, no friction involved. But when words that are pregnant with cultural content are involved, their differences in cultural values and the control they have over the thinking and behavior of the people ranges from minor to enormous.    

To fully explain the cultural content and role of the Spanish term macho (mah-choh) requires several hundred words.  To fully explain the Japanese term kaizen (kigh-zen), or “continuous improvement,” requires as many as a thousand words or more (there is a whole book on the subject).     

When working as a trade journalist in Asia in the 1950s and 60s I learned that the cultures of China, Korea and Japan were bound up in hundreds of key words in each of the three languages, and that you simply could not understand their respective ways of thinking and behaving without intimate knowledge of these key words.     

But technology, the new “God” of humanity, is on the verge of eliminating some of the linguistic barriers that separate human beings.    

Most of the world is familiar with the “universal language” devices used by the fictional Capt. James T. Kirk and the intrepid crew of Star Trek to communicate with the various life-forms they encountered during their travels around the galaxies. 

Now, reality is rapidly catching up with fiction. Japan’s Council for Science and Technology Policy [CSTP] has challenged the country’s automated speech translation researchers to improve the present technology in the next five years to the point that automated translators will in fact be a reality for Japanese who want to communicate with English and Mandarin speakers.    

Prototypes of these translators have already been field-tested in China, and the word is that they worked perfectly as long as the conversations were simple. The process is based on storing hundreds of thousands of sentences and speech patterns into the devices that have exact equivalents in the target languages.     

The goal of the CSTP is to have universal translators on the market for all of the world’s major languages within ten years!     

The impact that this will have on the world is so potentially profound and broad that over a period of a few generations it will surely change the nature of human cultures—something that gods have not been able to do since they were first created!    

But this revolutionary change in the ability of human beings to communicate with each other across language barriers will inevitably increase the volume of conversations. Every word in each language that is pregnant with cultural nuances and uses will have to be explained in detail to make the communication complete.    

If you think there is too much babble in today’s world, consider what it will be like when this is multiplied many times over!­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

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Boyé Lafayette De Mente is the author of more than 50 business, cultural and language books on Japan, China, Korea, Mexico, Hopi Land and Navajo Land. See his website: www.cultural-guide-books-on-china-japan-korea-mexico.com.