17 July 2002

Erasing language barriers

By Jim Pinto

Look at the thesaurus in Microsoft Word and you'll get a feel for what makes translation such a fusion of science and art: many different shades of meaning for a simple adjective like "soft" and several alternatives for a word like "mark" that can be either a noun or a verb.

With all the idioms and nuances of grammar, syntax, and semantics that make a language unique, efforts to create computer programs that can translate one language into another have continued for several decades.

Demand for automatic language translation programs is stronger than ever. The globalization of business requires endless translations; technical manuals and corporate documents have to be available in a variety of languages. English is dominant on the Web but by no means worldwide. Machine translation is getting better, improving global communications among ordinary people working in global environments.

The Language Analysis & Translation group at IBM Research is trying to solve these problems. Its system translates English to Spanish, French, German, or Italian and translates Web pages on the fly. An independent comparison of leading English to German machine translation systems for Web translation has given it a high rating.

Several leading search engines include language translation tools, allowing the ability to not only translate Web sites but also search for pages written in specific languages or pages from specific countries. There are also free, Web-based language translation services available.

You might try a simple but elegant experiment to evaluate these language translation software alternatives: Translate from English into another language (say, German or Spanish), and then convert that translation back to English.

All this translation is text based. For the next step, text to speech is a relatively simple conversion, but background noise affects converting audible speech to text. Another problem with converting speech to text is that it is still largely speaker dependent because it's tough to accommodate different accents.

But that technology, too, is making giant strides. Within a decade, telephone service will include automatic language translation as an option. And your pocket PDA will serve as an effective translator—both ways—when you go on a business trip, on vacation, or to almost any foreign country.

• Try the IBM online demo: Type in a URL, and see the translation.
• Try Google language tools
• Popular language translation Web site: English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, and Italian

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is founder of San Diego–based Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com, or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com.