Expect further big advances, soon.Īnd again, this technology is going mobile. But as I noted above, a lot of time, effort and money is being pumped into this. Their reactions tend to range between impressed, confused and amused, so there’s room for improvement. Search online for videos of that, and once you get past the slick corporate promotional videos you should find examples of multilingual friends taking it for a spin. The Economist article I cited earlier also reviews recent leaps forward in voice recognition, to work with unfamiliar voices and rapid speech.Ĭombining that with live translation gives you Skype’s new real-time translator. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I remember my dad using auto-dictation. The next piece of the puzzle is voice recognition. ![]() Point your phone at the Ristorante Italiano, and on the screen you’ll see an Italian Restaurant – not just as blocky subtitles but as text that actually overlays the text on the sign in front of you, as if the sign were written in your language. This kind of live translation is going mobile too, thanks to clever phone apps like Speak & Translate, or Google Translate. The computer doesn’t care if you speak proper! It only cares if you speak in a way that’s approximately comparable to how other people have spoken. This is not just good news for speakers of different languages but also of different non-standard dialects. So, highly reliable real-time automated translation doesn’t seem such a distant mirage.Īnd importantly, since it’s learning from spontaneous human input, it’s not just consulting dictionary-like formal grammars and vocabulary, but rather the way people really speak and write. A recent update to Google Translate in November 2016 improved the system “more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined”. The more data that goes in, the more accurate it becomes. ![]() Computers can now independently chew over vast databases of natural language, compare common patterns, and refine their own algorithms – see for example this pre-review academic paper outlining the Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system. Translation is increasing in accuracy more quickly than ever, fuelled by advances in artificial intelligence, neural networks, and machine learning – essentially computers learning on their own, not waiting for frail humans to gradually program them during waking hours and between meals. Technology is promising seamlessly connected reliable universal live translation (Source: )Ī recent article in The Economist shows incremental improvements to accuracy over recent decades. Meanwhile another recent controlled test, comparing the accuracy of automated translation tools, concludes that “new technologies of neural and adaptive translation are not just hype, but provide substantial improvements in machine translation quality”. But the programs still averaged around one-third accuracy. A recent university study of Korean-English translation, pitting various translation programs against a fleshy rival, came out decisively in favour of us air-breathers. Right? Well, that’s changing.Ĭurrent machine translation is not yet as good as humans, especially between very dissimilar languages. Computers can do the basics, but only humans get all the nuances right. Computer translation has long been a bit of a clichéd joke – accidentally translating your holiday request for a medium spiced latté into an insult about the barista’s mother. Then I’ll think through what that might mean for the field of language rights.įirst is the question of reliability. So I’ll start by reviewing where we actually are now, then I’ll join the dots from there to everyone being seamlessly equipped with reliable, universal live translation. There is some way left to go, and right now the market is still more hype than reality. That in turn will drive an existential shift in our approach to ‘language rights’.īut so far nobody has really said anything about all this, perhaps because the technology seems so distantly futuristic. What’s nagging me is that these developments will surely have a massive effect on how people speaking different languages interact. Meanwhile there is the burgeoning prospect of augmenting ourselves with technology to enhance our squishy human brains – the so-called ‘singularity’ of machine-human interaction. ![]() I read a lot of tech news, and it seems automated translation is about to get a whole lot better, and a whole lot more mobile. Something has been nagging at me recently.
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