Posted on 02/11/2015 10:19:49 AM PST by goldstategop
If real-time translation apps can get it right, they could upend a lucrative sector.
According to a recent report by the Economist newspaper - which cited consulting firm Common Sense Advisory - the language interpretation industry generates about $37bn (£24bn) worth of sales every year.
But the problems I experienced in Bilbao suggest that processor-powered translations still have far to go.
Those issues are indicative of speech recognition tech's limitations in general, according to Joseba Abaitua, an academic at the modern foreign languages department at Bilbao's University of Deusto.
Mr Abaitua, who specialises in online communication, suggests that interacting via a smartphone while face-to-face with someone else is always going to be "awkward". But, he adds, apps will become more effective as people get used to them.
"In a way, you have to… make a compromise, you have to know who are you talking to - you are talking to a speech recogniser, a machine," he says.
"So, the machine can start understanding you quite well and, if your sentences are short and well recognised, the translation system… may make a good job.
"But, if you start talking unexpected things with a lot of colloquialism, then the whole system breaks down."
He adds that systems need to get much better at recognising people's different accents and ways of speaking.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Google Translate often gets panned but translates Western languages surprisingly well. When you get to Middle Eastern and Oriental languages, that's when it spouts gibberish nonsense.
If you don't speak a foreign language and need good translation, its always advisable to hire a native speaker to make sure you and the other party reach a clear understanding, especially in business settings.
For Japanese even the great ones render Engrish gobbledigook...
“Google Translate often gets panned but translates Western languages surprisingly well. When you get to Middle Eastern and Oriental languages, that’s when it spouts gibberish nonsense.”
There is also the intelligence required to ‘read-between-the-lines’.
Additionally, when two people communicate via a translator patience is necessary.
One has to explain ‘colloquialisms’ and usually the two people communicating can make their point/s. I have found that for most English ‘colloquialisms’ there are similar and sometimes exact ‘colloquialisms’ in the foreign language.....enough so that not much ‘interpretation’ is required.
jeet yet?
No jew?
My wife and I earn a bit of coin doing translations.
A few months ago we had a client who took text from his business in Portuguese, translated it to German in google translator and then sent it to my wife with the instruction: make sense of this.
LoL!
Not ready.
I’ve had good luck over the last 2 years in multiple languages in multiple countries with simple apps that have helped me tremendously. Some apps were verbal interfaces with both me and the person I was talking to, others were typed interfaces. Most of the time I was either looking for a difficult word/technical word for a language I did speak or using basic simple sentences for a language I have no experience with.
I think in the last 5-10 years we’ve made significant leaps in this area.
Anyway, my colleague had an acronym, FAHQMT (he could actually pronounce it) which stood for Fully Automatic High Quality Mechanical Translation. That was his goal. Suffice it to say that fifty years later we still don't have FAHQMT, although we're closer to it than we were back then. When it comes to speech rather than printed text, the problems are even worse.
Back then there was a tale which might even be true. Allegedly one of the researchers on mechanical translation took the Biblical phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," had his program translate it into Russian, then translate it back into English. According to the tale, it came back as "The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten."
I have found that for most English ‘colloquialisms’ there are similar and sometimes exact ‘colloquialisms’ in the foreign language.....enough so that not much ‘interpretation’ is required.
I need to see a man about a horse.
Mongolian:
I need to see a horse.
I still laugh about that one, was able to communicate my needs one horse culture to another.
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