Review of Nicholas Ostler’s book The Last Lingua Franca
The glorious future of machine translation has an avid supporter - Nicholas Ostler, historian of world languages, President of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and author of The Last Lingua Franca.
Following his fascinating and erudite review of the rise and fall of such world languages as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Greek and Latin, Ostler’s new book leaves very little hope that English will maintain its dominant position in the modern world for much longer. Not because of strong competition from another language, but because of the growing linguistic diversity of the internet.
Between 2000 and 2009, Arabic on the internet grew twentyfold, Chinese x20, Portuguese x9, Spanish X7 and French x6, while content in English ‘only’ tripled. Proportionally, then, English is declining in importance relatively quickly. “The main story of growth on the Internet … is of linguistic diversity, not concentration.”
Ostler sees a key role for MT in this new environment. Just as the print revolution changed the ‘ground rules of communication’ in 16th century Europe, he expects that language and translation technology will revolutionize global communications tomorrow, removing the need for a ‘single lingua franca for all who wish to participate directly in the main international conversation.’
Put another way, this means that automatic translation is taking over as the new ‘lingua franca’. In the not too distant future everyone will be able to write and speak in their own language and ‘the world will understand.’ No more frustrating language barriers; all we need is compatible software.
Ostler is fully aware that he is treading on highly sensitive toes by making such bold statements about MT. Most interestingly, he blames the chronic dissatisfaction with the performance of MT systems on evaluator “naïveté”. These people do not seem to realize that humans have always been able to understand partially formed languages – especially lingua franca – and this is equally valid for MT.
“This naïveté is especially strong among monolingual Anglophones”, he remarks. For him, MT is not a tool that is supposed to convert alien codes into a fully-formed vernacular. It is simply a convenient way to communicate, just as a lingua franca has helped people communicate in many different contexts and cultures.
Although the degree of partial understanding provided by MT is often insufficient, Ostler expects it to improve exponentially, especially as we have started using new engines that learn in a “natural” way by being exposed to massive amounts of language data.
In this context, he expresses the wish that every language should have a comprehensive repository of language data (speech and text) to ensure that its speakers will be able to communicate automatically with the world. Whether a language is small or large, with MT as the new lingua franca, all tongues are becoming equal.
The Last Lingua Franca shows an incredibly wide-ranging knowledge of the history of languages, but it also provides authoritative opinions rooted in common sense. I liked his anecdote about the Danzin report in 1990 that evaluated the work performed by an army of academic researchers over the previous twelve years on the famous EUROTRA project - the EU-funded project intended to produce a multilingual MT system for the (then) nine official languages of the Union.
The Danzin report was written in French and then translated into English. In the summary, the French word insuffisant was translated as ‘inadequate’. Not strictly speaking a translation error. But “the underlying difference, probably, lies in the English-speaking habit of referring to inadequacies, rather than insufficiencies, betokening a more ruthless, less tolerant attitude to life’s little infelicities,” says Ostler. Yet the translation did lead to a clear linguistic split in opinions: the Romance-language delegates were much more positive about the possibilities of MT.
Translation errors or nuances in both humans and computers can naturally have an important impact. But there is no point in dismissing MT by judging it by some presumed norm of ‘perfect’ human translation. MT is a revolutionary tool that can help the world communicate better. And by the way, TAUS will be welcoming Nicholas Ostler as a speaker at the upcoming TAUS European Summit on May 31 – June 1 in Paris.
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