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Monday, June 12, 2006

The True Babel Fish: The Economist on 'Statistical Machine Translation' Software.

The Economist

writes (registration required) on

statistical machine translation software:

"[...] IT IS arguably the most useful gadget in the space-farer's toolkit. In 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams depicted it as a 'small, yellow and leech-like' fish, called a Babel fish, that you stick in your ear. In 'Star Trek', meanwhile, it is known simply as the Universal Language Translator. But whatever you call it, there is no doubting the practical value of a device that is capable of translating any language into another.

Remarkably, however, such devices are now on the verge of becoming a reality, thanks to new 'statistical machine translation' software. Unlike previous approaches to machine translation, which relied upon rules identified by linguists which then had to be tediously hand-coded into software, this new method requires absolutely no linguistic knowledge or expert understanding of a language in order to translate it. [...]

Within the next few years there will be an explosion in translation technologies, says Alex Waibel, director of the International Centre for Advanced Communication Technology, which is based jointly at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and at CMU. He predicts there will be real-time automatic dubbing, which will let people watch foreign films or television programmes in their native languages, and search engines that will enable users to trawl through multilingual archives of documents, videos and audio files. [...]"

Well, I'm quite seceptical. Reliable machine translation for real-world texts is announced to come soon since many years but up to now it appears to be a somewhat wonky thing. But IF, yes, IF The Economist should be right with this announcement, yes, then ... this would cause a little revolution with regard to the translation of legal texts, in particular patent documents.

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