How Google Translate Works

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.

In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

Much of the time, it works. It's quite stunning. And it is largely responsible for the new mood of optimism about the prospects for "fully automated high-quality machine translation".

Google Translate could not work without a very large pre-existing corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labour of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours.

Google's own promotional video doesn't dwell on this at all. At present it offers two-way translation between 58 languages, that is 3,306 separate translation services, more than have ever existed in all human history to date.

Most of these translation relations – Icelandic to Farsi, Yiddish to Vietnamese, and dozens more – are the newborn offspring of Google Translate: there is no history of translation between them, and therefore no paired texts, on the web or anywhere else. Google's presentation of its service points out that given the huge variations between languages in the amount of material its program can scan to find solutions, translation quality varies according to the language pair involved.

What it does not highlight is that GT is as much the prisoner of global flows in translation as we all are. Its admirably smart probabilistic computational system can only offer 3,306 translation directions by using the same device as has always assisted intercultural communication: pivots, or intermediary languages.

It's not because Google is based in California that English is the main pivot. If you use statistical methods to compute the most likely match between languages that have never been matched directly before, you must use the pivot that can provide matches with both target and source.

A good number of English-language detective novels, for example, have probably been translated into both Icelandic and Farsi. They thus provide ample material for finding matches between sentences in the two foreign languages; whereas Persian classics translated into Icelandic are surely far fewer, even including those works that have themselves made the journey by way of a pivot such as French or German. This means that John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT's Icelandic-Farsi translation device than Rumi or Halldór Laxness ever will. And the real wizardry of Harry Potter may well lie in his hidden power to support translation from Hebrew into Chinese. GT-generated translations themselves go up on the web and become part of the corpus that GT scans, producing a feedback loop that reinforces the probability that the original GT translation was acceptable. But it also feeds on human translators, since it always asks users to suggest a better translation than the one it provides – a loop pulling in the opposite direction, towards greater refinement. It's an extraordinarily clever device. I've used it myself to check I had understood a Swedish sentence more or less correctly, for example, and it is used automatically as a webpage translator whenever you use a search engine.

Of course, it may also produce nonsense. However, the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognise nonsense.)

Human translators, on the other hand, produce characteristically fluent and meaningful output, and you really can't tell if they are wrong unless you also understand the source – in which case you don't need the translation at all.

If you remain attached to the idea that a language really does consist of words and rules and that meaning has a computable relationship to them (a fantasy that many philosophers still cling to), then GT is not a translation device. It's just a trick performed by an electronic bulldozer allowed to steal other people's work. But if you have a more open mind, GT suggests something else.

Conference interpreters can often guess ahead of what a speaker is saying because speakers at international conferences repeatedly use the same formulaic expressions. Similarly, an experienced translator working in a familiar domain knows without thinking that certain chunks of text have standard translations that he or she can slot in.

Translators don't reinvent hot water every day. They behave more like GT – scanning their own memories in double-quick time for the most probable solution to the issue at hand. GT's basic mode of operation is much more like professional translation than is the slow descent into the "great basement" of pure meaning that early mechanical translation developers imagined.

GT is also a splendidly cheeky response to one of the great myths of modern language studies. It was claimed, and for decades it was barely disputed, that what was so special about a natural language was that its underlying structure allowed an infinite number of different sentences to be generated by a finite set of words and rules.

A few wits pointed out that this was no different from a British motor car plant, capable of producing an infinite number of vehicles each one of which had something different wrong with it – but the objection didn't make much impact outside Oxford.

GT deals with translation on the basis not that every sentence is different, but that anything submitted to it has probably been said before. Whatever a language may be in principle, in practice it is used most commonly to say the same things over and over again. There is a good reason for that. In the great basement that is the foundation of all human activities, including language behaviour, we find not anything as abstract as "pure meaning", but common human needs and desires.

All languages serve those same needs, and serve them equally well. If we do say the same things over and over again, it is because we encounter the same needs, feel the same fears, desires and sensations at every turn. The skills of translators and the basic design of GT are, in their different ways, parallel reflections of our common humanity.

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Author: David Bellos

Source: The Independent

How Foreign-Language Internet Strategies Boost Sales

Social media, lead generation, PPC campaigns -- it seems digital marketing has turned into the be-all and end-all of B2C communication and brand awareness. Companies have openly embraced digital marketing solutions in a mad race to reach, win and -- most important -- keep costumers in the highly competitive arena of e-commerce.
 
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But how about the challenges in trying to reach that coveted top Google search spot? Although English has long been the lingua franca of the Web, it has now reached a point of saturation. It is becoming incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to compete with those billions of optimized Web pages vying for consumer attention.
 
While businesses are engaging on all e-marketing fronts, there's a largely untapped opportunity that the vast majority have failed to embrace: foreign-language Internet. Due to less competition for keywords and domain names, and less content overall, the multilingual Web offers unparalleled opportunities to bolster sales in overseas markets easily and affordably.
 
With the exponential rise of non-English searches and the massive growth of emerging economies, savvy businesses could reap significant benefits by targeting far-flung markets in a linguistically and culturally sensitive way.
 
Companies shrewd enough to tap into this opportunity have experienced significant ROIs. Such has been American restaurant consulting and hospitality management company OnSite Consulting, which launched six language versions of their site in late 2010 and experienced significant foreign market growth: 20% of their revenue now comes from abroad.
 
Facts that substantiate the need for companies to address consumers in their mother tongue keep emerging, and hammer home the point that the road to better sales runs through the foreign-language Internet:

• 82% of European consumers are less likely to buy online if the site is not in their native tongue (Eurobarometer survey).
• 72.4% of global consumers are more likely to buy a product if the information is available in their own language (Common Sense Advisory).
• The English language currently only accounts for 31% of all online use, and more than half of all searches are in languages other than English.
• Today, 42% of all Internet users are in Asia, while almost one-quarter are in Europe and just over 10% are in Latin America.
• Foreign languages have experienced exponential growth in online usage in the past decade -- with Chinese now officially the second-most-prominent-language on the Web. Arabic has increased by a whopping 2500%, while English has only risen by 204%

The recession holding Europe and North America in its grip may be a bad time for business expansion at home. But not if you dare to look far enough. There are flourishing markets unscathed by the crisis. It's no secret that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are experiencing a spending boom, with consumerism growing at a rapid pace. What is more, an estimated billion people in the BRIC countries will be using computers by 2015 -- another reason why businesses should consider focusing their foreign digital marketing efforts on these countries.

Other emerging markets where there's less competition on the Web include the CIVETS countries -- Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. But beware -- as more and more businesses are realizing the potential of BRIC and CIVETS markets, competition for keywords and online presence is likely to grow.

After all, recession needn't be an obstacle to business expansion. As the semantics of the Chinese word for crisis (meaning both danger and opportunity) aptly demonstrates, businesses should overcome the fear of breaking into new markets and realize the only way to reap the benefits presented by the emerging markets is to fearlessly dip their toes in the multilingual Internet.

Source: MediaPost Communications
Author: Christian Arno

The Rise of the Virtual Office

As the definition of the workplace changes, dramatic increases in productivity could be ahead

The idea that the office is a specific place where our professional lives "happen" is becoming less universal, and less important. These days many knowledge workers can be productive anywhere, thanks to smarter, more numerous mobile devices, faster network access, and a growing number of online collaboration tools. Telecommuting is no longer merely something that the phone company is trying to sell you. And wherever "the office" may be, wider and better use of social networks, data analytics, and smart technologies such as voice recognition could be poised to increase productivity dramatically—meaning that both real and virtual offices may have fewer people in them.

But while the physical office is changing, certain connotations of the word "office" are not. I can think of two others —"hierarchical organization" and "place for human interaction"—and there's no indication that these are becoming any less important. Even the most progressive high-tech companies retain many of the organizational trappings of their industrial-age predecessors: full-time managers, org charts, job descriptions, and so on. And since humans remain social animals, conventional gathering places will remain important in business. These spaces—whether they be conventional offices, temporary ones, or conference facilities—must be made conducive to collaboration. They must also become physically healthy places to spend hours of time, since sedentary work has emerged as a significant health threat.

As the office expands beyond its conventional boundaries, key challenges must be met, including the privacy and security issues posed by a distributed global workforce of people who work digitally and use multiple devices. New tools like cloud-based office productivity apps must be made not only user-friendly but resistant to attacks and data loss. And workers will need better tools—including improved voice-recognition software, e-mail-organizing technologies, and intelligent agents that help handle complex tasks once reserved for specialists—to streamline work processes, make sense of the overwhelming volumes of data besieging them, and improve productivity.

To date, IT-driven productivity gains within the office have been somewhat modest, at least compared with those seen in manufacturing. In 1989 the U.S. manufacturing sector employed 18 million people; by 2009 that figure had declined to 11.8 million. But though the workforce shrank 34 percent, the value added by U.S. manufacturers—that is, the value of their output minus the cost of raw materials purchased—surged 75 percent, to 1.78 trillion.  We've definitely observed white-collar productivity improvement as well, especially since the mid-1990s, but it hasn't been as big.

That may soon change. Consider that people already routinely deal with computers rather than office workers when they make an airline reservation, buy products and arrange for delivery, or troubleshoot a problem with a product they own. If a task involves simple and predictable forms of communication without much nuance or emotion, computers can do just fine, leaving humans to handle an ever-dwindling number of exceptions to the usual procedures or questions.

More far-out advances in artificial intelligence could push productivity even further. Voice recognition, speech synthesis, and automatic translation have improved significantly. And we've seen that computers can now accurately understand and reply to questions: IBM's Watson supercomputer beat human competitors at Jeopardy! earlier this year. Skeptics will point out that futurists have been promising an AI-driven revolution in knowledge work for decades. But by now even the skeptics are finding phone numbers with the help of computer-based operators. When the productivity enhancements from these innovations are tallied, I predict that they will be striking.

On top of this, software and social tools can boost the productivity of the remaining human office workers. For example, a customer-service rep who deals with technical questions can work with just one customer at a time on the phone, but it's easy to handle two or more customers simultaneously if the medium is instant messaging. Whole office-based industries may become vastly more efficient; the legal profession, for one, may be in the early stages of a deep transformation, especially since the prices clients are willing to pay are going through the floor. A new breed of legal outsourcing offers much cheaper ways to accomplish certain tasks: contract lawyers and digital tools scan documents during discovery processes, for example. Intelligent software will only get better at finding associations in those documents and mining meaning from it all.

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Source: Technology Review
Author: Andrew Mcafee

Recognizing voices depends on language ability

Study finds that for people with dyslexia, it’s much harder to identify who is speaking

Distinguishing between other people's voices may seem like a trivial task. However, if those people are speaking a language you don't understand, it becomes much harder. That's because you rely on individuals' differences in pronunciation to help identify them. If you don't understand the words they are saying, you don't pick up on those differences.

That ability to process the relationship between sounds and their meanings, also known as phonology, is believed to be impaired in people with dyslexia. Therefore, neuroscientists at MIT theorized that people with dyslexia would find it much more difficult to identify speakers of their native language than non-dyslexic people.

In a study appearing in Science on July 29, the researchers found just that. People with dyslexia had a much harder time recognizing voices than non-dyslexics. In fact, they fared just as poorly as they (and non-dyslexics) did when listening to speakers of a foreign language.

The finding bolsters the theory that impaired phonology processing is a critical aspect of dyslexia, and sheds light on how human voice recognition differs from that of other animals, says John Gabrieli, MIT's Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience and senior author of the Science paper.

"Recognizing one person from another, in humans, seems to be very dependent on human language capability," says Gabrieli, who is part of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and also a principal investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Verbal cues

The lead author of the study, MIT graduate student Tyler Perrachione, earned his undergraduate and master's degrees at Northwestern University, where he was involved in studies showing that it is easier to recognize voices of people speaking your own language.

"Everybody's speech is a little bit different, and that's a big cue to who you are," he says. "When you're listening to somebody talk, it's not just properties of their vocal cords or how sound resonates in their oral cavity that distinguishes them, but also the way they pronounce the words."

After Perrachione arrived at MIT, he and Gabrieli decided to try to link this research with evidence showing that phonological processing is impaired in people with dyslexia. They tested subjects in identifying people speaking their native language (English), then Chinese.

When listening to English, the non-dyslexic subjects were correct nearly 70 percent of the time, but performed at only 50 percent when trying to distinguish Chinese speakers. Dyslexic individuals performed at 50 percent for both English and Chinese speakers.

"It's a beautiful study, in the sense that it's so simple," says Shirley Fecteau, a visiting assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and research chair in cognitive neuroplasticity at Laval University in Quebec. "It really seems like a very clear effect on voice recognition in people with dyslexia."

The finding suggests that people with dyslexia may have even more trouble following a speaker than they may realize, Gabrieli says. This adds to the growing evidence that dyslexia is not simply a visual disorder.

"There was a big shift in the 1980s from understanding dyslexia as a visual problem to understanding it as a language problem," Gabrieli says. "Dyslexia may not be one thing. It may be a variety of ways in which you end up struggling to learn to read. But the single best understood one is a weakness in the processing of language sounds."

Friend versus foe

Recognizing other members of one's species by their voices is critical for humans and other social animals. "You want to know who is a friend and who is a foe, you want to know who your partner is," Perrachione says. "If you're cooperating with someone for food, you want to know who that person is."

However, it appears that humans and animals perform that task in different ways. Animals can identify other members of their own species by the sounds they make, but that ability is innate and based on the sounds themselves, rather than the meaning of those sounds.

"We notice individual differences in this learned feature of our communication, which is the words that we use, and that's what really distinguishes human communication from animal communication," Perrachione says.

The researchers believe their work may also offer insight into the performance of computerized voice-recognition systems. Voice-recognition programs with access to dictionary meanings of words might do a better job of understanding different speakers than systems that only identify sounds, Perrachione says.

The researchers are now using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine which parts of the brain are most active in dyslexics and non-dyslexics as they try to identify voices.

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Source: MIT News
Author: Anne Trafton

The Future of Translation and Interpretation

Interpretation enables people who speak different languages to understand each other. An interpreter is someone who is able to translate text or spoken words from one language to another. The world has become more diverse and globalized. The need for translators as well as translation services has, consequently, risen. Luckily, the way professionals offer these services is constantly evolving.

Onsite interpreting is delivered a number of ways, one of which involves the interpreter translating after a live speaker pauses. The translation is performed gradually and requires the speaker to take breaks during which the translation is performed for an audience or group. Consecutive interpretation is more effective in certain interpreting contexts, though it is often difficult to determine what interpretation method will be be best for a given situtation. Consecutive interpreters must have the memory skills to accurately summarize portions of a speech after they've been uttered. While the consecutive speech translation does not require verbatim translation, it calls for an ability to capture the most significant messages and ideas of the speakers in the target language.

One might say that simultaneous interpretation skills are even harder to develop and deploy. Simultaneous interpretation specialists often train by trying to perform live translation services of a TV or radio show. Interpreters work inside a booth with a basic mixer they can control, including an input channel, output channel, volume control and mute button. Also provided are chairs, microphones and some kind of cooling system. The best simultaneous translators confer with the speakers prior to their presentation. On some occasions, they have access to the document from which the speaker is reading, beforehand. Speakers who are being translated try to create delays in the delivery of their speeches to facilitate translation. Though the speaker's words or meaning may, at times, not be clear, the translator has to keep the translation moving forward by not fixating on any particular word or phrase and making their speech as a whole tangible to those listening.

Telephone interpretation is another form of simultaneous interpretation. It is employed in an array of situations. Health care and government as well as law enforcement agencies are common users. It is increasingly used by corporations, however, who have customers across broad markets where multiple languages are spoken by their customers. Telephone interpretation using Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) or Video Relay Service (VRS) technology is an option suitable for the deaf, hard-of-hearing or speech-impaired. Interpretation via telephone is the realm of of the translation industry that shows the most room for growth and where demand is anticipated to most expand, in light of the fact that communications between parties are remote or distance communications.

There are 6,909 languages spoken in the world today. While English is being adopted as the common tongue, many worldwide do not choose to use or don't know English and use another language for conferences, speeches and other communications instead. The more obscure a language is, the more likelihood there is for a live or phone translation service needed. Hopefully, as countries across non-western areas of the world -- where languages other than English and more culturally dominant languages are spoken -- emerge economically, the type of demand for translation services will change and expand in interesting ways.

Emerging Markets and the Economics of Internationalization

Internationalization, abbreviated as i18n (for the 18 letters between “I” and “n”), is the means of adapting computer software for different locales.

Often, requirements for entering new markets include localization, a process that compensates for regional differences in a product, and translation. Companies at times overlook internationalization, which best prepares a product for localization by flagging potential locale issues. These are all major considerations a business needs to consider when looking to expand to a global market.

As the world economy becomes more global, it is important for business to understand how to stay on top. Companies are always looking for ways to stay competitive in an environment that isn't always fair and has recently become open to countries like China, India and Brazil. 

Projections show that the US GDP (currently the highest GDP in the world) will fall to third by the year 2050 behind emerging powerhouses China and India (the US is projected to fall behind China in terms of GDP as early as 2018). Brazil is projected as a distant 4th, but coming on strong. Granted the numbers are projecting 40 years out, and such things are volatile, but the idea remains in principle.

According to a presentation in March by Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business at Saint Louis University, China and India are producing 500,000 scientists and engineers per year. Obviously, this gives greater opportunity for domestic companies to outsource their software development projects, but it also means that there is an educated market emerging for domestic companies to sell to.

Domestic markets are no longer en vogue for American companies, they need to think global. On the other side of the coin, with growing international companies also comes higher value for international currency and subsequent lower value for domestic currency.

In much the same way, but to a lesser extent, that US consumers will buy stuff in Mexico due to the favorable exchange rate, buyers in China and India will be more inclined to buy American products due the depreciated exchange rate of the dollar. You could call it the light at the end of the tunnel in what has been a tough domestic economy in recent years. For a more in depth look at how international markets are emerging, read Philip Guarino's article on Elementi Consulting's site.

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Source: http://technorati.com

Author: Spencer Thomas

A Guide To Interpreters And Translators

Interpreters and translators facilitate the cross-cultural communication necessary in today’s society by converting one language into another. However, these language specialists do more than simply translate words-they relay concepts and ideas between languages. They must thoroughly understand the subject matter in which they work in order to accurately convey information from one language into another. In addition, they must be sensitive to the cultures associated with their languages of expertise.

Although some people do both, interpreting and translation are different professions. Interpreting Services deal with spoken words, translators with written words. Each task requires a distinct set of skills and aptitudes, and most people are better suited for one or the other. While interpreters often interpret into and from both languages, translators generally translate only into their native language.

Interpreters convert one spoken language into another-or, in the case of sign-language interpreters, between spoken communication and sign language. Interpreting requires that one pay attention carefully, understand what is communicated in both languages, and express thoughts and ideas clearly. Strong research and analytical skills, mental dexterity, and an exceptional memory also are important.

Sign-language interpreters facilitate communication between people who are deaf or hard of hearing and people who can hear. Sign-language interpreters must be fluent in English and in American Sign Language (ASL), which combines signing, finger spelling, and specific body language. Most sign-language interpreters either interpret, aiding communication between English and ASL, or transliterate, facilitating communication between English and contact signing-a form of signing that uses a more English language-based word order.

Some interpreters specialize in oral interpreting for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and lip-read instead of sign. Other specialties include tactile signing, which is interpreting for people who are blind as well as deaf by making manual signs into their hands, using cued speech, and signing exact English.

In contrast to the immediacy of simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting begins only after the speaker has verbalized a group of words or sentences. Consecutive interpreters often take notes while listening to the speakers, so they must develop some type of note-taking or shorthand system. This form of interpreting is used most often for person-to-person communication, during which the interpreter is positioned near both parties.

Translators convert written materials from one language into another. They must have excellent writing and analytical ability, and because the translations that they produce must be accurate, they also need good editing skills.