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Machine
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"A renewed
international effort is
gearing up to design
computers and
software that smash
language barriers and
create a borderless
global marketplace."
- Steve Silberman
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engine
"What is Machine Translation? Machine translation (MT) is the
application of computers to the task of translating texts from one
natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in
computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but
today a number of systems are available which produce output
which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful in a
number of specific domains." A definition from the European
Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), "an organization
that serves the growing community of people interested in MT
and translation tools, including users, developers, and
researchers of this increasingly viable technology."
Military getting high-tech help from SRI lab - New system can
recognize words, understand simple foreign phrases. By Tom
Abate. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com (May 29, 2006).
"During a recent product demonstration at SRI headquarters in
Menlo Park, computer scientist Harry Bratt spoke into the
microphone of his lab's new translation computer: 'Did you hear
the explosion this morning?' Several seconds later, software
written by SRI International scientists piped the question through
the computer's speaker -- this time in the Iraqi dialect of Arabic.
Saad Alabbodi, an Iraqi immigrant posing as a civilian being
questioned by a U.S. soldier, answered in his native tongue.
There was another pause as the computer translated Alabbodi's
reply into English in a mock interrogation that provided another
example of how technology is slowly mimicking complex human
capabilities such as speech. [Go to the related podcast to
hear the actual conversation.] ... 'One of the crying needs in
Iraq is overcoming the language barrier,' said Kristin Precoda,
director the SRI lab that developed the two-way translation
system called IraqComm."
National Institute of Standards and Technology's 2005 Machine
Translation Evaluation: "The objective of the MT evaluation
series is to develop technologies that convert free text from a
variety of languages into English. There were two source
languages (Arabic & Chinese) and one target language (English)
evaluated in the MT-05 evaluation."

Also see this related news article: Google dominates in
machine translation tests. By Michael Kanellos. CNET
News.com (August 22, 2005).
An overview of machine translation, by John Hutchins
(University of East Anglia, United Kingdom: updated January
2005), is available from the British Computer Society's Natural
Language Translation Specialist Group.

Also see John Hutchins' Machine Translation website for
additional resources such as:
o his History of Machine Translation in a Nutshell;
o his collection of "[a]rticles, books and papers about
machine translation and computer-based
translation tools, the historical development and
current use of computers for the translation of
natural languages;" and
o the complete text of his book, Machine Translation:
past, present, future (Ellis Horwood Series in
Computers and their Applications) 382 pp.
Chichester (UK): Ellis Horwood, 1986; New York:
Halsted Press, 1986.
Machine Translation: An Introductory Guide. By Doug Arnold,
Lorna Balkan, Siety Meijer, R.Lee Humphreys and Louisa Sadler
(1994). "The topic of the book is the art or science of Automatic
Translation, or Machine Translation (MT) as it is generally known
--- the attempt to automate all, or part of the process of
translating from one human language to another. The aim of the
book is to introduce this topic to the general reader --- anyone
interested in human language, translation, or computers."
"The international center for Advanced Communication
Technologies, interACT, is a joint center between the Universität
(TH), Karlsruhe, Germany and Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, USA."

See these related news articles.
Scaling the Language Barrier. By Sebastian Rupley. PC
Magazine (July 13, 2004). "In the annals of computer comedy,
one of the most famous anecdotes is about asking a speech
recognition engine, 'Recognize speech?' The translation comes
back: 'Wreck a nice beach.' Getting machines to understand
both spoken and written language has been an elusive goal for
the tech industry for many years. Now, thanks to a wave of
government funding and technical breakthroughs, machine
translation (and understanding) of written language is getting
unfunnier by the minute. ... The one clue Meaningful Machines
has given about its software is that it will use new methods of
statistically ranking the likelihood of what entire phrases mean,
rather than just translating one word at a time. That allows it to
discern whether the word baseball in a given phrase refers to a
ball or a game. ... Carnegie Mellon University, the University of
Southern California, and Microsoft Research operate some of
the largest programs for developing machine translation
software. Microsoft is primarily focused on extracting meaning
from documents in English."
E-translators - the more you say, the better, By Gregory M.
Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor (April 22, 2004). "Universal
translation is one of 10 emerging technologies that will affect our
lives and work 'in revolutionary ways' within a decade,
Technology Review says."
Speech-to-Speech Translation. IBM Research. "The goal of the
Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2S) research is to enable realtime, interpersonal communication via natural spoken language
for people who do not share a common language. The
Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR)
system is the first S2S system that allows for bidirectional
(English-Mandarin) free-form speech input and output. The
research leading to MASTOR was initiated in 2001 as an IBM
adventurous research project and was also selected to be
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) CAST program (formerly called 'Babylon' program). ...
Construction of robust systems for speech-to-speech translation
to facilitate cross-lingual oral communication has been the
dream of speech and natural language researchers for decades.
It is technically extremely difficult because of the need to
integrate a set of complex technologies – Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU),
Machine Translation (MT), Natural Language Generation (NLG),
and Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS)...." Links to publications
and additional information appear at the bottom of their page.
Robo-talk helps pocket translator. By Jo Twist. BBC News
(March 4, 2004). "Visitors landing at Tokyo's Narita Airport will
be able to hire a device which can translate the local lingo. The
speech-to-speech technology was developed by NEC, tested in
Papero robots and then put in PDAs. ... As well as being able to
understand and imitate human behaviour, Papero (Partner-Type
Personal Robot), is the first robot to translate verbally between
two languages in colloquial tongue. It can cope, in other words,
with slang and local chatter, and has a vocabulary of 50,000
Japanese and 25,000 English travel and tourism related words."
Computer aid ensures speedy, high-quality translations. IST
Results (January 12, 2005). "Increasing translators' productivity
is the goal of TransType2, an innovative computer-aided system
that allows rapid and efficient high quality translations. Due to
end in February, the 36-month IST programme project has
drawn on two of the most commonly used translation
technologies developed to date: Computer-Assisted Translation
(CAT), in which human translators work in unison with a
computer; and Machine Translation (MT), in which the computer
handles the entire process. While both techniques have
advantages and drawbacks, TransType2 has 'used the best of
both worlds' says project manager José Esteban at Atos Origin
in Spain."
Software learns to translate by reading up. By Will Knight.
NewScientist.com news service (February 22, 2005).
"Translation software that develops an understanding of
languages by scanning through thousands of previously
translated documents has been released by US researchers.
Most existing translation software uses hand-coded rules for
transposing words and phrases. But the new software,
developed by Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu at the Information
Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California,
US, takes a statistical approach, building probabilistic rules
about words, phrases and syntactic structures. The pair founded
a company called Language Weaver in Los Angeles, US, to sell
the software as an automated translation tool."

Visit Language Weaver's web site.
The Translation Challenge. By Chip Walter. Technology Review
(June 2003). "Researchers are making progress today using
three basic approaches drawn from natural-language
processing. Knowledge-based machine translation, for example,
relies on human programmers to write lists of rules that describe
all possible relationships between verbs, nouns, prepositions,
and so on for each language. ... A second approach, examplebased systems, relies chiefly on raw computing power. ...
Statistical techniques also depend on computing power to
compare reams of previously translated text. However, this
strategy selects the most likely translation using sophisticated
mathematical models that the software continually upgrades
based on how often its interpretations prove accurate."
Another Step Closer to Artificial Intelligence. DW-WORLD.DE.
(December 1, 2001) "This year's prestigious German Future
Prize has been awarded to the inventor of an electronic
translating device which brings humanity one step closer to the
concept of Artificial Intelligence. ... [Professor Wolfgang]
developed the 'Verbmobile'. This is essentially a computer that
translates between German, English and Japanese."

Find out more about the Verbmobil at the German
Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH).
Tongue twisters. Machine-translation systems chip away at
language barriers. Richard A. Quinnell. CommVerge (August
2002). "Now, more than ever, communications and information
exchanges are crossing both national and linguistic boundaries.
Fortunately, the same computer systems that make such
international connections possible can assist in breaking down
the language barriers, via machine translation from one
language to another. Unfortunately, they are far, far from perfect
at doing so. But with careful utilization in appropriate
applications, machine translation can open an inexpensive crack
in linguistic barriers that would otherwise require costly human
translation to scale. ... 'Machine translation is an artificial
intelligence discipline, not simple pattern matching,' Akers says.
'It needs a deep understanding of grammar, semantics, and the
like for the source language so it can do syntactic parsing.' It
also needs an equal understanding of the target language's
structure in order to synthesize its output sentences."
U.S. soldiers get talking translators. Associated Press / available
from CNN Asia / and MSNBC(October 7, 2002). "If U.S. troops
soon storm into Iraq, they'll be counting on computerized
language translators to help with everything from interrogating
prisoners to locating chemical weapons caches. Besides
converting orders like 'put your hands up' into spoken Arabic or
Kurdish, military officials hope to enable quick translations of
time-sensitive intelligence from some of the world's most difficult
tongues -- normally a painstaking task. ... Machine translations,
especially of spoken voice, have bedeviled intelligence agencies
for decades. ... Today, the portable devices are one facet of a
broad machine translation effort that combines private industry
and universities with military, intelligence and police under the
Language and Speech Exploitation Resources, or LASER,
program overseen by [Lt. Col. Kathy] De Bolt. Automating
translations remains one of the toughest challenges in
computing -- especially conveying humor and irony. ... For now,
the two-way Audio Voice Translation Guide System, also known
as TONGUES, developed for Lockheed Martin by Carnegie
Mellon University's language lab, appears to be the only device
that converts speech back and forth between languages, said
John Moody, a Lockheed engineer in charge of the project.
Lockheed tested two of the laptop machines in Croatia in April
2001 at the behest of Army chaplains who wanted help talking to
refugees and dying patients."
The World Wide Translator. Will Web-wide "translation memory"
finally make machine translation pay off? "Hour is the moment
for all the good men to come to the subsidy of them country." By
Alan Leo. MIT Technology Review (September 21, 2001). "'This
whole area of language is extremely complex,' says IDC analyst
Steve McClure. 'It's probably the most complicated problem in
computer science that I'm aware of.' Computer-assisted
translation typically involves two steps. First, a rules engine
parses the original sentence, attempting to identify the
relationships between the words. The engine then translates
each word within the context that it believes to be correct-- often
with mixed results."
You can translate text of your choice by using free translators
such as these from:
AltaVista
Applied Language
SDL International
GOOGLE
InterTran
SYSTRAN
... and for a peek at the lighter side of Machine Translation see:
Fun With Automatic Translation, from Shtick!
The DePaul University American Sign Language (ASL)
Synthesizer. "Combining computer technology and linguistics
research to bridge the communication gap between the deaf and
hearing worlds, our team of deaf and hearing researchers is
working towards the realization of a digital English-to-ASL
translator." Visit their site and meet "Paula," a virtual interpreter.
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Computer Program Translates Spoken English Into Sign
Language. AScribe Newswire / available from National
Geographic (August 12, 2002). "Paula is a computergenerated synthetic interpreter developed by a team of
faculty and students in the School of Computer Science,
Telecommunications and Information Systems at DePaul
University in Chicago. The system works like this: A
hearing person speaks through a headset, which is
connected to the computer. The computer processes the
command, and the animated figure of Paula translates the
message into ASL through hand gestures and facial
expressions on the computer screen."
Animated interpreter translates spoken English into sign
language for travelers. By Liz Austin. The Associated
Press / available from NewJersey.com / also available
from The New York Times (August 16, 2002). "Navigating
airport security is stressful for anyone these days. But it's
even harder if you're deaf. ... Computer scientists from
DePaul University believe they have a solution: a 3-D
animated interpreter that can translate spoken English
into American Sign Language. Using speech recognition
and animation software, the team has created 'Paula'" an
animated figure that translates simple sentences into the
hand and body positions, configurations and facial
expressions that make up ASL."
I See What You Are Saying. By Dr. Judith Markowitz.
Speech Technology Magazine (September/October
2003). "Theres no doubt that speech recognition is an
assistive technology. ... The goal of the DePaul
researchers is to capture spoken instructions and convert
them into the fourth most widely-used language in the
United States -- American Sign Language (ASL). 'This
involves transforming verbal communication into an
animated visual format,' says graduate student Sunny
Srinirasan. 'It’s really a machine-translation project where
the translation is from sounds to hand movements and
positions.'"
Speech, Language & Virtual Human Research at the School of
Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia. Here's where
you'll find Guido, a "virtual signer" (see this May 5, 2005 press
release) and TESSA & VANESSA.
Digital characters 'talk' to the deaf. By Jon Wurtzel. BBC (March
2, 2002). "Using digital avatars as signing translators could
significantly expand the ways deaf and hard of hearing people
communicate with the hearing world. The avatars are computer
animations designed to look and move like real people. A
computer program takes spoken English and converts it in realtime to text. The digital avatars then take this English text and
sign its meaning on a display screen, in effect becoming a
translator between spoken English and British sign language. ...
Businesses should pursue this technology, and not just because
it is the right thing to do. The deaf and hard of hearing account
for 8.6 million of the 59 million people in the UK. Combine that
with the millions throughout the world who would also benefit,
and a huge market opportunity emerges for the right products."

Find out more about this field on our Assistive
Technologies page.
Talking to Strangers. By Steve Silberman. Wired (May 2000;
8.05). "A renewed international effort is gearing up to design
computers and software that smash language barriers and
create a borderless global marketplace."
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Machine Translation's Past and Future. A timeline from
Wired covering the span from 1629 through the year
2264! Compiled by Kristin Demos and Mark Frauenfelder.
Universal Translators - A look at the hubs for machine
translation R&D worldwide. Compiled by Carl Zimmer.
And also see the rest of the translation related articles in
this issue of Wired.
For related news, see the
General Index to AI in the
news: Natural Language.
Lost in Translation. By Stephen Budiansky. The Atlantic Monthly
(December 1998 / Volume 282, No. 6; pages 80 - 84). "In one
famous episode in the British comedy series Monty Python a
foreign-looking tourist clad in an outmoded leather trenchcoat
appears at the entrance to a London shop. He marches up to the
man behind the counter, solemnly consults a phrase book, and
in a thick Middle European accent declares, 'My hovercraft ... is
full of eels!' ... This episode is brought to mind by some recently
available computer programs that claim to provide automatic
translation between English and a number of other languages.
Translation software that runs on mainframe computers has
been used by government agencies for several decades, but
with the advent of the Pentium chip, which packs the power of a
mainframe into a desktop, such software can now easily be run
on a personal computer."

Also see this article from the August 1959 issue of The
Atlantic Monthly: The Translating Machine, by David O.
Woodbury. "Professor William N. Locke, head of MIT's
modern languages department and a prime mover in
machine translation, is not going to be satisfied even with
this kind of short cut. He would like to have a machine
that will translate material that is merely spoken to it. This
is not so fantastic as it sounds." (Volume 204, No. 2;
pages 60 - 64.)
"The Center for Machine Translation (CMT) is a research branch
of the School of Computer Science [at Carnegie Mellon
University] devoted to basic and applied research in all aspects
of natural language processing, with a primary focus on machine
translation, speech processing, and information retrieval.
Containing a unique mix of academic and industrial researchers
specializing in various aspects of computer science, artificial
intelligence, computational linguistics and theoretical
linguistics...."

Be sure to check out their current research such as
DIPLOMAT (Distributed Intelligent Processing of
Language for Operational Machine Aided Translation)
and the Lockheed-Martin-led Tongues project.
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. "AMTA is
an association dedicated to anyone interested in the translation
of languages using computers in some way. This includes
people with translation needs, commercial system developers,
researchers, sponsors, and people studying, evaluating, and
understanding the science of machine translation (MT) and
educating the public on important scientific techniques and
principles involved. ... AMTA has members in Canada, Latin
America, and the United States. It is the regional component of a
worldwide network headed by the International Association for
Machine Translation (IAMT)."
Automating Knowledge Acquisition for Machine Translation. By
Kevin Knight. AI Magazine, 18(4): Winter 1997, 81-96. "Machine
translation of human languages (for example, Japanese,
English, Spanish) was one of the earliest goals of computer
science research, and it remains an elusive one. Like many AI
tasks, translation requires an immense amount of knowledge
about language and the world. Recent approaches to machine
translation frequently make use of text-based learning algorithms
to fully or partially automate the acquisition of knowledge. This
article illustrates these approaches."
Some DARPA projects:
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Babylon. "Program Objective: The goal of the Babylon
program is to develop rapid, two-way, natural language
speech translation interfaces and platforms for the
warfighter for use in field environments for force
protection, refugee processing, and medical triage.
Babylon will focus on overcoming the many technical and
engineering challenges limiting current multilingual
translation technology to enable future full-domain,
unconstrained dialog translation in multiple environments.
One-way Phrase Translation System (PTS)
Phraselator
TIDES: Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and
Summarization
also see the National Institute of Standards and
Technology's Machine Translation Benchmark Test and
the 2005 results.
Semantic Networks. By John Sowa. "A semantic network or net
is a graphic notation for representing knowledge in patterns of
interconnected nodes and arcs. Computer implementations of
semantic networks were first developed for artificial intelligence
and machine translation, but earlier versions have long been
used in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics."
Language Translation (TRL) at IBM. "This project deals with
natural language analysis and translation by computer.
Technologies used for machine translation, such as syntactic
parsing and word sense disambiguation, are commonly used for
other applications of natural language processing."

Also see this December 2004 article from AI in the news.
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