TRANSLATION IN THE 21st CENTURY
Leading the way to new applications
We may expect – indeed are already seeing - many new applications emerge from this convergence of vision and technology. Automatic translation is already embedded in support services, social networks, text messages, and will be perfected through continued use. MT will also find new markets in language-rich media such as speech communication (speech to speech translation) and multimedia environments such as film subtitling, as well as in more constrained applications for the visually or linguistically impaired. Instead of a maximum of two or three languages used on notice boards, road signs and other public information sites in venues such as airports, stations, hospitals and government buildings, embedded MT could be personalized for user preferences via mobile camera devices or eyeglasses, offering a user-centric language version rather than top-down language imposition. In a ubiquitously digital world, will all language-carrying media be automatically user-translateable via a cloud application? Or will MT always be a local act defined by a service provider?
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Although Facebook’s priorities currently focus more on matters of privacy, table manners, and the ethics of information sharing, it – and all social media platforms - may have to address the inevitable tidal wave of user demand for more sophisticated services. These involve not just multilingual interfaces to the network, but multilingual relationships between and among humans themselves. Automated instant messaging translation has already emerged as large communities 'fractalize' into smaller and smaller interest groups that wish to keep in constant contact, hence the “Bing Translator” for Windows Live Messenger, and a range of niche plug-in translation engines for other IM services. As one of Facebook’s translation managers has put it, the service may need to develop and work with a different language model per Facebook user!
Google’s translation future may ironically be more about sound and vision than text.
The company is actively researching speech recognition, while promoting its own Android telephone technology, and is clearly interested in enabling search and other information activities on the small-form factor of the mobile phone. No doubt telephone usage will drive the construction of speech data repositories that will be even larger than their text data, and both will ultimately be able to feed off the same translation engine, once the speech has been transcoded into text. The Goggle application, demonstrated earlier this year, is basically a camera that can snap a photo of a text (menu, advert, road sign, etc) and send the image off to Google Translate to find out what it means in the Goggles user’s language.
As a long-time center of R&D in speech, text and other language technologies, IBM is theoretically well positioned to bring translation enhancements to corporate IT infrastructures. In practice it is likely to focus on integrating translation automation functionality wherever it can simplify and optimize business processes. The current efforts to leverage crowdsourcing may turn out to be a transient phase in the more over-arching process of building integrated automated information flows for example in product lifecycle management.
True to its strategy of rendering the user interface more natural, Microsoft expects that automatic translation will become even more transparent, and operate across multiple communication platforms so as to be available wherever needed in any situation. Microsoft has also developed its own speech technology and is in the process of launching the Windows 7 phone, bringing together the ingredients needed to explore the potential for speech translation.
These four innovators show the path forward to new realities in 21st century translation: universal, ubiquitous access to information and communication across most languages of the world, enabled by professionals and committed volunteers, supported by ever more sophisticated technology. For the translation industry, we live in interesting times!
This article is the first of a series assessing key developments in translation. These changes create hope, uncertainty, and calls to action for government, business, citizens, academia, and the translation profession. Future articles will review in more detail the wide ranging issues raised here. As always we encourage readers to embrace change, take control, and seek out growth.
