Will Machine Translation Ever Beat Human Translation?

By Lauren Broderick

The idea of a future where people can communicate effortlessly with each other in different languages, translated perfectly by machines, is a seductive one. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we didn’t have to go to the trouble of learning other languages any more?

Although machine translation technology is evolving all the time, it’s clear that we haven’t quite achieved this utopian vision yet. But will it ever happen?

Machine translation simply means the use of software to translate text or speech into different languages. The idea has been around for a long time – researchers began working on machine translation projects back in the 1950s. The first commercial system appeared in 1991, with the first web applications following along a few years later.

Today machine translation technology ranges from massively used, free online translation services such as Google Translate, to cheap, on-the-go mobile phone apps such as Apple’s iTranslate, to rather more expensive, customizable, professional software packages such as SDL Trados Studio.

The benefits of machine translation are obvious:

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• It’s cheap - machine translation is much cheaper than human translation, and can even be done for free, depending on which service you use.
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• It’s quick - for on-the-spot translation needs, or time-critical web content such as breaking news, it’s hard to beat machine translation.
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• It’s improving all the time - researchers are continually striving to make machine translation technology better.

Read the full article here 

Translate Your World Debuts New Revolutionary Speech Translation Software for Hospitality and Tourism Industries

Translate Your World, developers of language software and mobile applications, introduces its revolutionary "TYWI –Tourism,” a suite of software that enables staff and managers to speak up to 78 languages instantly, thereby eliminating the language barrier.

These unprecedented language tools are designed to help facilities attract and retain more international visitors while at the same time improving internal cross-language foreign employee communication.

“I have lived in 17 countries. Each time I went to a new country I found myself ordering mystery food at restaurants, taking unintelligible tours, and using lousy interpreters for important business meetings. With today’s technology there is no reason why people should not communicate,” says Sue Reager, president of Translate your World. “However, true communication is more than finger pointing, providing service is more than handing out a room key, and an information booth should be capable of sharing information. TYWI smashes the insurmountable language barrier and offers the ability to converse across languages, take your interpreter in your laptop, and type across-languages.”

Hospitality and Tourism businesses have struggled for decades to communicate with visitors from Asia, the Baltics, Middle East, and the Americas, and tourist attractions muddle through in the local language, never dreaming that it could be possible to offer their tours in dozens of languages at the same time. In the past, communication using only a smattering of words in another language has been the only option available, yet has never been sufficient to make international guests feel welcome, to answer their questions, and improve their experience.

For complete article, click here

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We will be speaking about Communication in the EB5 Industry as a part of the the Hot Topics Panel.

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European Union prepares to adopt 24th official language as costs mount, calls for English rise

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Interpreters of various languages translate a presentation at the 

European Commission headquarters in Brussels. 

(Photo: courtesy of the European Commission.)

The Treaty of Rome in 1957 founded what is now the European Union, and was supposed to be the beginning of the end of nationalism in Europe.

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But over a half-century later, walking through any of the EU buildings in Brussels, it feels like nationalism never went away.

Officially, deputies and delegates will only speak in their national languages, as a matter of principle. Attending them is a small army of translators and interpreters who assure their message is translated into the languages of the rest of the union — at a current cost of $1.4 billion per year.

The big irony, though, is that once they are away from the podium or the microphone, and they are hanging out with other European bureaucrats by the water cooler, they comfortably switch into English, the de facto lingua franca of the union.

You might wonder then, when most, if not all, EU bureaucrats master English, what’s the point in maintaining 23 official languages, especially at such expense? Why not just use a single language and, what’s more, why not use the language all EU bureaucrats master — English?

For complete article, click here

Does Language Bring Us Together or Pull Us Apart? 

Listen to the Story

TED Radio Hour

8 min 34 s

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Spoken And Unspoken



About Mark Pagel's TEDTalk

Biologist Mark Pagel says our complex language system is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.

About Mark Pagel

Mark Pagel is the head of the Evolution Laboratory in the biology department at the University of Reading. Pagel builds statistical models to examine how evolutionary processes imprint in human behavior, from genomics to the emergence of complex systems to culture. His latest work examines the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution. Pagel argues language is a culturally transmitted replicator with many of the same properties we find in genes.

What Happens When a Language's Last Monolingual Speaker Dies? 
By Kat Chow

Emily Johnson Dickerson died at her home in Ada, Okla., last week. She was the last person alive who spoke only the Chickasaw language.

"This is a sad day for all Chickasaw people because we have lost a cherished member of our Chickasaw family and an unequaled source of knowledge about our language and culture," Chickasaw Nation Gov. Bill Anoatubby said in a news release. The Chickasaw Nationhas about 55,000 members and is based in the southern part of central Oklahoma.

Dickerson, 93, was one of about 65 people fluent in the Chickasaw language, which has seen its number of speakers shrink from thousands since the 1960s.

"Chickasaw was the dominant language in Chickasaw Nation, both prior to and following removal [when Chickasaw people were forced to relocate to Indian Territory*]," says Joshua Hinson, director of the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program. "It was the late 1880s, 1890s and into the 1900s when we started to see a shift toward English."

The people who still speak Chickasaw — now in their 60s and 70s — started learning English when they were forced to go to boarding schools for Indians or local public schools. Dickerson didn't learn another language because, Hinson says, she didn't need English. She was from a traditional community, Kali-Homma', and didn't work in a wage economy.

For complete article, click here

      

Musicians tell Central African Republic It's Time for Peace 

by OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON 

Senegalese music star Youssou Ndour, who is Muslim, is joining with a Christian artist from Central African Republic to record a song of peace. The country has been devastated by inter-religious violence. Ndour hopes the song will encourage strong international solidarity, and help to restore peace to the country.

Listen to the Story

Morning Edition

  

How Language Seems to Shape One's View of The World

By Alan Yu

Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas 5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right.

She says the difference lies in language. Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, says the Australian aboriginal language doesn't use words like left or right. It uses compass points, so they say things like "that girl to the east of you is my sister."

If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice.

Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of applied linguistics at Temple University. She studies bilingualism and is the author of an upcoming book on this work.

If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko.

For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material.

For the complete article, click here

Language Remains a Barrier in Latino Health Care Enrollment

By Cheryl Corley

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All Things Considered

As the Obama administration touts an increasing number of people signing up under the Affordable Care Act, there's a push to get Latinos enrolled. This demographic represents the most underinsured group in the country. Politics around Obamacare and Latinos are heating up, with a new ad attacking the ACA and a Latino congressman who supports the measure.