New Auto-Translator

[Alcazar]

Small robots with friendly faces have helped out in the development of handheld translation gadgets to be tried out by travellers in Japan.

Visitors landing at Tokyo's Narita Airport will be able to hire a device which can translate the local lingo.

As well as being able to understand and imitate human behaviour, Papero (Partner-Type Personal Robot), is the first robot to translate verbally between two languages in colloquial tongue.

It can cope, in other words, with slang and local chatter, and has a vocabulary of 50,000 Japanese and 25,000 English travel and tourism related words.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3513623.stm
This invention should be great for travellers, and you can bet that the technology will spread so that handheld devices for translation eventually become common. This is much like the US military's 'phraselator' device, which is amazingly useful.


The advent of this technology might also eventually see the end of the eikaiwa industry. Or it could end up being a big help in encouraging people to learn English by assisting them......

[Caustic Saint]

New from Sony:

My first Dalek!

[Taro Toporific]

Visitors landing at Tokyo's Narita Airport will be able to hire a device which can translate the local lingo

Nope no worky.

I got home at 10pm because some MORON engineers asked me to, "brush up, pRease," a 20 page Linux pico-kernel manual that was machine translated J-to-E. Only I got up at page 11 after putting 5 hours of overtime editing almost every single word. I quit and will have to go in at 5am to finish the simple "brush up the engrish" job. Arrrrg.

It's gonna take two jugs of Mrs Taro's finest Ume-shu, vintage '99, to clear out my head from this "device which can translate the local lingo. " Yeap. This is a nice toy, that might say "KONICHI WA"... if you slowly say 'good morning' to it. That's it. Machine translation just makes more work for sorry f'ed Gs like me.

[Alcazar]

Actually Taro I thought of you when I was putting this FG article together because I remembered your work is to do with assisting in getting things like this to work.

That's a pity if it's so rudimentary-I guess these things are always hyped somewhat.

On a side issue, I'm disappointed about what is often reported in the media-when I was younger I used to derive more pleasure from reading positive stories, but often you realise what they are reporting is just bullshit-say when you know something about the specific issue at hand.

eg this other current BBC report: Church helps soothe Australia's Aborigines, I mean, WTF?
When you know what's happening on the ground it's like 'Riiiiiiight'.

[cstaylor]

a 20 page Linux pico-kernel manual that was machine translated J-to-E.

When will said software and manual be available? Or is this TRON revisited?

[plaid_knight]

when I was younger I used to derive more pleasure from reading positive stories, but often you realise what they are reporting is just bullshit-say when you know something about the specific issue at hand.

The same thing is usually true with the negative stories.

On a side note, it'd be interesting to see if the machines spout out Engrish like "All your base are belong to us!" and "Someone set up us the bomb."

[Socratesabroad]

asked me to, "brush up, pRease," a 20 page Linux pico-kernel manual that was machine translated J-to-E.

That's it. Machine translation just makes more work for sorry f'ed Gs like me.

Taro, you're a better man than me. I think once someone gave me some translation work in Excel format to translate and asked that I 'just check' one of the pages that had been translated already - only, it had been 'machine translated' by some outsourcers in Sri Lanka. Hehehe, had a good laugh over that - hell, the sentence order was still like that in Japanese, so everything sounded Yoda-esque:

Run out of paper this machine has, more you must add.

Kind of wanted to leave the whole thing like that and let the US salespeople handle it. Come to think of it, for the last few months before I quit, that was just what I did...

[Taro Toporific]

asked me to, "brush up, pRease," a 20 page Linux pico-kernel manual that was machine translated J-to-E.
... Machine translation just makes more work for sorry f'ed Gs like me.

... I quit, that was just what I did...

Ok, I hope the best but machine translation E-J/J-E is in the Stone Age.

HOWEVER, machine-aided translation finally coming of age here in Japan 5-10 years after its introduction in Europe. TRADOS is the main tool being used here in Japan. It works like a networked fuzzy-logic search-&-replace engine for documentation workteams. Everyone in my office in hooked in TRADOS so as one person translates one section the past translations of similar sections are SUGGESTED as possible translations. I review the key suggested patterns, rank the quality, give boot-to-the-head feedback, and fix the real engRish fark-ups. At $800/seat, the TRADOS system ain't cheap and it has a long-&-nasty learning curve for users but it increases productivity 20%.

Like a loaded gun, machine-aided translation can be dangerous but effective. Management and quality issues are a nightmare. I have one bonehead client who mistakenly thinks the offical JIS Dictionaries are actually correct (hundreds of errors) and so he keeps put out translations with JIS engrish. The poor sod ends up paying me a small fortune to fix his messes.

Oh, I quit the project at 10pm Friday...yes that was just what I did too Socratesabroad. I never did finish the video control parts of CE Linux Forum* (CELF).
*(Consumer Electronics) products such as digital home appliances. Publication date unknown for those Ver 2.2 upgrades.

[Socratesabroad]

Taro, no worries, I've relocated to China, so let me know if you're ever in the neighborhood.

You it the nail on the head as far as machine translation being in the Stone Age. And yes, I too messed about with Trados for a while when I worked at a translation company in Tokyo - of course, with that dongle and all the other crap, it never did amount to anything I'd buy personally. Additionally, my last company checked Trados out but never took the plunge since the software wouldn't allow J-J entry (I called them once and confirmed, but you can only do 2-byte lang to single or vice-versa, but you can't do 2-byte to 2 byte).

I did manage to acquire Atlas Ver. 9 through some means which I shan't mention here, and the translation software has proven a bit useful. As you can imagine, I would never use it to translate whole sentences or anything (as the maker Fujistu laughingly suggests), but it does real well with charts, graphs, etc. or other one/two word or idiot-proof translations. Works in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc. and can prove a good tool if you're a slow typist like me.

Well, if you FGs are in the Tianjin neighborhood, let me know...

[Video-Link Japan]

[Taro Toporific]

NEC translator ...
...Sooner or Later it all Gets Real.

YES! "Gets Real."
I wanna use the NEC on-the-fly two-way speech translator on a PDA in my Flying Car while I fly up to Elvis's UFO for good Mexican food in Japan for dinner!

[Video-Link Japan]

YES! "Gets Real."
I wanna use the NEC on-the-fly two-way speech translator on a PDA in my Flying Car while I fly up to Elvis's UFO for good Mexican food in Japan for dinner!

LMK when we're booked for Mex-dinner w/Elvis & I'm there

[kurohinge1]

NEC shows the Papero Personal Robot project on its e-zine "Special Feature". Personal robots are designed to interact with people and be programmed for human-like interactions and tasks. Sometimes called electronic helpers, these robots can navigate around objects and speak in simple phrases. [just like FG's ] ...

PaPeRo also identifies people it knows, using face-recognition technology and two cameras for eyes. It maps faces until it achieves a match with a template in its memory, then greets the person by name. This face-recognition technology is also available as NeoFace, a software development kit for biometrics used for secure login access to office computer networks and in airport security systems ... more

I'd like that NeoFace in my mobile phone, please. That way, when I forget someone's name I can just subtly point the keitai at them and it will pop up their name on the screen.