Europe is a 500 million strong market of literate, fairly well behaved and healthy people! But the dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects put a big brake on European progress. The more time I spend in both Western and Eastern Europe the more I believe that language {and bureaucracy} is preventing Europe from becoming a more agile global super-power. While the prospect of a single language dominating Europe is pretty far fetched, real-time translation is going to be music-greeting-card cheap within a decade.
Text-to-text translation is getting better all the time. With growing rosetta stones of data, like the UN library {millions of documents all manually translated into many languages} it’s just going to get better and better. The EU Library will add to this. speech-to-text is finally approaching real-time accent independent accuracy. Text-to-speech is getting very good, and will be featured on some upcoming cell phones. Let it read your sms messages to your blutooth headset; transcribing your voice into a reply is only a few years away.
Within 10 years, 2018, Europe’s language barriers will be gone, and I think we’ll see some amazing things.
I can see your point. That ability to analyze and retain all the input data is amazing. If the machines could properly find connections, patterns and shortcuts between the different language versions of texts, the translators would be in trouble. And life will get easier for most people.
Who is going to learn languages then? I guess those nations that will be excluded from the linguistic support of big software companies.
Hehe, oh sure you have text-to-speech now, but here in North America we won’t get that tech for a while yet….
You’re not a poor translator/interpretator, it’s just that you’re right, it’s HARD. It’s just humans, and people with your skills especially, are really good at pattern recognition, machines are catching up, but we still rule here.
But imagine if you could recall every English/German/Polish lesson you’ve ever taken, every conversation you interpreted, and every document you’ve ever translated? Humans are bad at this, but machines are very, very good at it.
I’ve just got a feeling that as the machines get better at the pattern recognition, and they’re getting better all the time, it will enable this kind of tech. I was at a live R&D demonstration of live Japanese-English and English-Japanese telephone machine translation with real people, and it was spot on. This was in 2001.
I know this might impact you and your career choice. But machines are not going to be teaching us meat-puppets languages anytime soon, that’s really hard, and they’re will always be a call for real language training. I just don’t think it will be needed to allow European citizens access to EU multilingual services.
J, you’re so behind in hi-tech
My Nokia 5500 already synthesizes text into speech, in various languages too. And I’m impressed by how natural all of it sounds.
I’m not so sure, however, about the automatic translation/interpretation. Maybe I’m a poor interpreter, but that makes me think how difficult it must be to make it understandable, let alone listenable.
But judging from the voice synthesis from a few years ago and today, we’re in for some huge progress. There’s no telling what will it give us.