Machine translation
Babel or babble?
EVER since God confounded the people of Babel, we have been left with imperfect solutions to communicating across borders. One of those has been the lingua franca, a commonly known second language in which different nationalities converse. That trick sufficed for millennia, but it could be reaching the end of its lifespan, according to Nicholas Ostler, author of "The Last Lingua Franca" (which The Economist reviewed in 2010). Machine translation software may become so advanced as to render second-language learning useless.
Mr Ostler renewed his claims that machine translation does away with the need for a lingua franca at the Hay Literary Festival last week. Many linguists disagree with him, including David Crystal, who has forecast that English may “find itself in the service of the world community forever.” But we once thought the same about Greek, Persian, Latin and French, all of which became obsolete.
“Evidently, automatic systems replacing a real lingua franca is likely to be a bit different” than one lingua franca replacing another, Mr Ostler told your correspondent. “The process will run faster for mainstream languages than for the peripheral smaller fry. But I think the development will be unmistakable within one generation—say by 2050.”
Yet the quality of machine translation is still uneven at best. Google Translate is probably the best of the bunch. It has 200m users a month by the last count, and translates in a single day the equivalent of the whole annual output of the globe’s professional translator corps. While there’s no doubt that it is a powerful and useful tool, it can produce embarrassing errors. There are fewer mistakes than there were in 2001 when Google launched it, but there still seems a long way to go until sci-fi technology becomes real.
It’s feasible that machine translation could replace human translators for written texts. Text is easier to translate than conversation, and is better suited to the technology, which is "trained" by huge corpora of human-translated texts. But these tools are only as good as the corpora themselves. Google Translate draws on a variety of texts, including documents from the European Union and United Nations. These are chock-full of legalese, and rarely represent the everyday language of man. Finding more representative texts without raising the hackles of copyright enforcers could prove a stumbling block.
There is also a remaining reliance on English as an intermediary language for translation. Precious few Galician novels will have been translated into Welsh nor Welsh novels into Galician, but both make their way into English. Though humans may not use English as a lingua franca in the future, necessity dictates that the machine translators still will (as Asya Pereltsvaig seems to have busted Google Translate doing). What machine translation will allow, says Mr Ostler, is those “minority language speakers to intervene—at last—directly in wider issues to a wider audience” as their niche languages become easily translatable by gadgets. That does, of course, discourage people from learning the language in the first place.
Spoken language is too quick and fragmented for machine translation today. Simple dictation software must be carefully trained, never mind the extra step of translation. Ordinary conversation is full of false-starts and errors that speakers and listeners barely notice, but which computers are baffled by. And of course tone of voice, cultural references, idiom and humour multiply the challenges. The true-to-life Babel fish is some ways away.
Idealist and pessimist tribes gather around the future of machine translation. Your correspondent is a pessimist, but would dearly like to be proved wrong, because Mr Ostler's vision of the future is an exciting one. “Increasingly, electronic tools will be there for people to get what they need from documents and recordings in foreign languages,” he explains. “And real-time gizmos will support people’s needs in face-to-face interaction too.” Verb conjugation tables and vocabulary lists may be consigned to history. Add schoolchildren to the many others who would rejoice in a lingua-franca-free future.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/06/machine-translation
Mr Ostler renewed his claims that machine translation does away with the need for a lingua franca at the Hay Literary Festival last week. Many linguists disagree with him, including David Crystal, who has forecast that English may “find itself in the service of the world community forever.” But we once thought the same about Greek, Persian, Latin and French, all of which became obsolete.
“Evidently, automatic systems replacing a real lingua franca is likely to be a bit different” than one lingua franca replacing another, Mr Ostler told your correspondent. “The process will run faster for mainstream languages than for the peripheral smaller fry. But I think the development will be unmistakable within one generation—say by 2050.”
Yet the quality of machine translation is still uneven at best. Google Translate is probably the best of the bunch. It has 200m users a month by the last count, and translates in a single day the equivalent of the whole annual output of the globe’s professional translator corps. While there’s no doubt that it is a powerful and useful tool, it can produce embarrassing errors. There are fewer mistakes than there were in 2001 when Google launched it, but there still seems a long way to go until sci-fi technology becomes real.
It’s feasible that machine translation could replace human translators for written texts. Text is easier to translate than conversation, and is better suited to the technology, which is "trained" by huge corpora of human-translated texts. But these tools are only as good as the corpora themselves. Google Translate draws on a variety of texts, including documents from the European Union and United Nations. These are chock-full of legalese, and rarely represent the everyday language of man. Finding more representative texts without raising the hackles of copyright enforcers could prove a stumbling block.
There is also a remaining reliance on English as an intermediary language for translation. Precious few Galician novels will have been translated into Welsh nor Welsh novels into Galician, but both make their way into English. Though humans may not use English as a lingua franca in the future, necessity dictates that the machine translators still will (as Asya Pereltsvaig seems to have busted Google Translate doing). What machine translation will allow, says Mr Ostler, is those “minority language speakers to intervene—at last—directly in wider issues to a wider audience” as their niche languages become easily translatable by gadgets. That does, of course, discourage people from learning the language in the first place.
Spoken language is too quick and fragmented for machine translation today. Simple dictation software must be carefully trained, never mind the extra step of translation. Ordinary conversation is full of false-starts and errors that speakers and listeners barely notice, but which computers are baffled by. And of course tone of voice, cultural references, idiom and humour multiply the challenges. The true-to-life Babel fish is some ways away.
Idealist and pessimist tribes gather around the future of machine translation. Your correspondent is a pessimist, but would dearly like to be proved wrong, because Mr Ostler's vision of the future is an exciting one. “Increasingly, electronic tools will be there for people to get what they need from documents and recordings in foreign languages,” he explains. “And real-time gizmos will support people’s needs in face-to-face interaction too.” Verb conjugation tables and vocabulary lists may be consigned to history. Add schoolchildren to the many others who would rejoice in a lingua-franca-free future.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/06/machine-translation
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