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Language Translation Tech Starts to Deliver on Its
Promise
By Quentin
Hardy from bits.com
January 11, 2015 7:00 am January 11,
2015 7:00 am 40 Comments
The tech
industry is doing its best to topple the Tower of Babel.
Last month, Skype,
Microsoft’s video calling service, initiated simultaneous
translation between English and Spanish speakers. Not to be outdone, Google
will soon announce updates to its translation app for phones. Google Translate now offers
written translation of 90 languages and the ability to hear spoken translations
of a few popular languages. In the update, the app will automatically recognize
if someone is speaking a popular language and automatically turn it into
written text.
Certainly, the
technology of turning one tongue to another can still be downright terrible –
or “downright herbal,” as I purportedly said on a test of Skype. The service
also required a headset and worked best if a speaker paused to hear what the
other person had said. The experience was a little as if two telemarketers were
using walkie-talkies.
But those
complaints are churlish compared with what also seemed like a fundamental
miracle: Within minutes, I was used to the process and talking freely with a
Colombian man about his wife, children and life in Medellín (or “Made A,” as
Skype first heard it, but it later got it correctly). The single biggest thing
that separates us — our language — had started to disappear.
Those language
mistakes are a critical part of how online products get better. The services
improve with use, as so-called machine learning by computers examines outcomes
and adjusts performance. It is how the online spell check feature became
dependable, and how search, map directions and many other online services
progress.
“The program
learns as you using the conversations,” is how Sebastian Cuberos, my new friend
from Colombia, put it during our Skype call. “At this time, is pretty good.”
The grammar isn’t perfect, but you know what he means.
Just a few
thousand people are using the service on Skype. As it learns from them, it will
bring in more of the nearly 40,000 people waiting to try the Spanish-English
service. Even in these early days, it elicits the possibility of social studies
classes with children in the United States and Mexico, or journalism where you
can live chat with a family in Syria.
Google says its
Translate app has been installed more than 100 million times on Android phones,
most of which could receive the upgrade. “We have 500 million active users of
Translate every month, across all our platforms,” said Macduff Hughes, the
engineering director of Google Translate. With 80 to 90 percent of the web in
just 10 languages, he added, translation becomes a critical part of learning
for many people.
Automatic
translation of web pages into some major languages is already a
feature on Google’s Chrome browser. People using the browser can
render a page that is in English into, say Korean. There are also 140 languages
in which it is possible to change things like Gmail settings.
It is possible
to set your email to languages like Klingon, Pirate and Elmer Fudd. Other
options, like Cherokee, are more serious, and Google aspires to eventually have
these as full translation languages. Google will also soon announce a service
that enables you to hold your phone up to a foreign street sign and create an
automatic translation on the screen.
Microsoft’s
Bing Translation engine is used on Twitter and Facebook. Facebook, which also
features communication across the borders of language by operating the world’s
largest photo sharing service, also has its own translation efforts. It has
also signed up thousands of people to a waiting list for Skype to offer other
simultaneously translated languages, like Chinese and Russian.
Feeding the
“corpus,” as linguistics engineers call their database of language, has become
critical for some countries as well as for the sake of machine learning.
Google, which uses human translation to initiate its service, recently added
Kazakh after a government official went on television to ask people to help
out. “People can ask very, very strongly that we put their language on the
service,” Mr. Hughes said.
Still, some
experts worry as machines look more deeply at individual uses of meaning
through things like intonation and humor. What will it mean if, as with our
search terms and our Facebook “likes,” these become fodder for advertisers and
law enforcement?
“The technology
is potentially magical, but the threats are real too,” said Kelly Fitzsimmons,
co-founder of the Hypervoice Consortium, which researches the future of
communication. “What would it mean to have a corpus of conversations after
there is regime change, and a new government doesn’t like what you said?”
Currently, Ms.
Fitzsimmons said, just 1 percent of consumers consent to having their data
recorded overtly. That is what people do when they help machine learning of
translation, however, or when they use voice-based assistants like Siri. She
thinks individuals will become better at managing their own privacy, and not
outsourcing it to the providers of services. But for now, all kinds of
information is surrendered for convenience.
Olivier
Fontana, director of product marketing in the Skype project, says conversations
are broken up into separate files before people check a translation for
quality. “There is no way to know who said what,” he said. “The N.S.A. couldn’t
make sense of this.”
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