Deciphering Languages

While Economies growing faster ever, people travelling all the time, world is becoming smaller and people are trying hard to communicate crossing the language barriers, InterAct working on advance communication technologies have solutions to offer.

Following Agriculture, Industrialisation and technology, Globalization is the current phase of revolution shaping up generation next for humans. Globalization in infancy has all legitimate problems to offer, culture specific issues being one of the prominent. Other then 101 strategic issues Language is one of the barriers slowing down people getting together and globalizing. In limited context Socializing and Globalizing are not very different. People will avoid going to disco pubs if they know little or know enough to hate dancing.

While we were in schools and colleges hitting keyboards in our computer labs, language scholars in least remembered foreign language departments were realising the potential problem we are facing now. Pioneers in the field then and now are Research labs at MIT and privately funded research institutes like Interactive system labs founded in 1991 by Professor Alex Waibel. Now part of Interact founded in 2004. Alex Waibel and his research team are working on various research projects on communication and speech technology at InterACT. The international center for Advanced Communication Technologies, interACT, is a joint center between the University (TH), Karlsruhe, Germany and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Current demonstration of few tools from Prof. Wiabel Gadgets inventory are no less then science fiction for most of us.

Speech Translation System

This technology is based on electrical signals from muscle movement of cheeks, neck and throat. Sensors are implanted in mouth to capture these electrical signals and translated to different languages in matter of seconds. In his demonstrations in october 2005 a science graduate from CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) with 11 tiny electrodes in his mouth murmured some chinese phrase. This information is captured instantly and transferred to attached computers that translated to english and spanish and displayed on the screen.

Translation Goggles

Think of a movie Terminator Judgement day, Arnold entering in a pub and reading demographics of all the boozers. Translation Goggles are ver 1.0 of one of the functionality of such kind. Person who is wearing these goggles will be able to see text in his chosen language on inner side of the glasses almost like subtitles in the movies. So when you have waitress asking for an order in mandarin chinese you can wear Translation goggles to know that you are no more in happy hours.

Simultaneous Translation

Developed by InterACT labs in partnership with German car manufacturer Daimler-Chrysler, with this technology one can give a speech in his own language and still get heard to multilingual audience. Technology for users like us is a array of ultrasound speakers each delivering narrow beam of sound wave generating specific language phonetics. This is probably the first technology to be out in real world as we have MNC's growing and CEO wants to reach out till the last layer of the organizations.

Translation Technology

At the core of these cutting edge speech delivery systems is a robust translation technology created in the past two years by Prof. Waibel and his colleagues. To make it possible to translate spontaneous speech about unlimited potential subjects, Waibel said his team developed statistical methods that allow the computer to learn from loads of example translations available on the Internet. Also rather than producing a word-by-word translation, the system builds phrases, smoothing out some of the quirks of sentence structure among different languages.

Existing speech to speech translation systems are capable of real time translations in only limited areas like shopping and hotel reservations, still very few to be really effective. Technologies under research at InterACT holds promise for allowing more real time language and speech translations like UN meetings, telephone conversations, TV broadcast, match commentaries, lectures in forums and all forms of open ended communications.

Communication for Future

Future systems will be capable of learning and maybe evolving to translate oldest and most modern spoken language. Prof. Alex Waibel comments "It will make communication and cultural learning more likely since people using this technology will be empowered to come together when they wouldn't otherwise interact". According to Prof. Wiabel Even the most advanced speech translation systems won't make the study of foreign languages obsolete, rather he believes the opposite might be true.

Although there are atleast 10 years before such technology is a real world practice, However if such gadgets took over the communication between peoples from varied cultures, definitely we will at more ease and never look back learning and understanding the speaker the way we use to. Considering the fact or assumptions that these machines will never outgrow human capabilities we will definitely miss out on some cross-cultural learning.

BY KB