Babelfish Not Required

December 16, 2014 11:17 AM

On Dec 15, 2014, Microsoft announced the first public beta preview for new Skype Translate, a service which will (eventually) work as a go-between to help break down language barriers during voice calls. The initial trial is Spanish <> English only, [2m marketing video] but that's only the beginning. How, though, does it work? And the even bigger question, DOES it work? (The answer appears to be yes.)
posted by hippybear (45 comments total)

This is truly awesome, but it makes me a little sad, too. Because I feel pretty confident Magyarul is going to be way, way down on the development list. And all of the people I'd want to speak with most are Hungarian. "til then, I'll just keep bugging my partner to translate.

But it'd be nice ot be able to call her mom and see how's she's doing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:26 AM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

be able to call her mom

Just yell into the phone and add some o's and a's to the end of English words. The gist will be gotten eventually.
posted by jsavimbi at 11:30 AM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Phase 2: Thought translation
Phase 3: Thought control
posted by blue_beetle at 11:31 AM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

just yell into the phone and add some o's and a's to the end of English words. The gist will be gotten eventually.

Sometimes, when I miss my mother-in-law, I just hang out in a craft store until I hear an old woman speaking a language I do not know and I imagine she is criticizing my weight and calling me a slob.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:32 AM on December 16, 2014 [24 favorites]

Wow .. This is really interesting. Who knew NLP has moved this far along.

But then again, "Hello ? Computer?"
posted by k5.user at 11:34 AM on December 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

This is exciting, and the beginning of something great... But...

In the 'Does it work' link, the examples used were essentially the stuff you'd find in the first chapter of a language learning book "what do you like to do"... And even then there were translation problems. So, you might find the bathroom with this tech, but you certainly aren't going to have any kind of interesting/serious/in depth conversation with the tech at this state.
posted by el io at 11:35 AM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sorta, a lot of their conversation was about how there were miscommunications and video glitches.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 11:39 AM on December 16, 2014

Ok, this goes a ways towards easing the future shock disappointment one feels over no moonbase by now.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:40 AM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Will I be kept informed in real time as to what advertising it's inserting into the translation of my sentences? What if it has me endorsing products I disapprove of?
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:40 AM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Also, will the NSA tap be quick enough to quash or hilariously mistranslate any secrets I might be giving away?
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:42 AM on December 16, 2014

I can't be alone in thinking there's a tremendous amount of social good to breaking down communication barriers

Remember the Babelfish...

We don't need this. We need an app that can translate between mutually incomprehensible dialects of English, such as Left/Right, Marketing/Reality, Man/Woman, and Me/You.

Then we'll see some serious action. and the final apocalypse so clearly foreseen by The Great Prophet Adams.
posted by Devonian at 11:43 AM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Then we'll see some serious action. and the final apocalypse so clearly foreseen by The Great Prophet Adams.

TRANSLATION:

"I would like a cheeseburger and the location of the nearest bathroom guided by a Grizzly Bear."
posted by Atreides at 11:48 AM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

This would be a very useful tool. However, although literal translations is obviously extremely valuable, it's only one aspect of human communication; and sometimes the biggest miscommunications occur when people think they understand each other perfectly.
posted by clockzero at 11:52 AM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

We worry too much about the logical content of words. We need a program that translates the emotional nuance of what is said.

All sentences henceforth will translate into "I am alone and afraid and alone and scared and so alone and I need you to love me and why dont you love me and I am so scared and alone and please love me."
posted by mrjohnmuller at 11:54 AM on December 16, 2014 [13 favorites]

It would be hilarious if some honest translation crept in there due to machine learning without any human editorial intervention. I mean maybe not as blatant as "I think we should see other people" being translated as "I've been banging your sibling for weeks", or "We must get together sometime" as "with luck I'll never see your face again"; but perhaps more basic truths like "we'll call you" when said in a particular manner being translated as "we've already ruled you out".
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:02 PM on December 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

Metafilter:"I am alone and afraid and alone and scared and so alone and I need you to love me and why dont you love me and I am so scared and alone and please love me."
posted by Devonian at 12:03 PM on December 16, 2014 [8 favorites]

My hovercraft is full of eels!
posted by escabeche at 12:10 PM on December 16, 2014 [5 favorites]

"I am alone and afraid and alone and scared and so alone and I need you to love me and why dont you love me and I am so scared and alone and please love me."

That, or a howl of pure rage.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:18 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

We worry too much about the logical content of words. We need a program that translates the emotional nuance of what is said.

But it is in fact the complex interplay of empirical reference, intersubjectivity, and individual experience that makes human language what it is.
posted by clockzero at 12:19 PM on December 16, 2014

I've always answered that "what would you want your superpower to be" question with "understand ALL the languages!"

OMG. I thought I was the only one with that superpower wish! Right on!

Hopefully, this thing will eventually be able to translate Pennsytuckian.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:22 PM on December 16, 2014

"However, although literal translations is obviously extremely valuable, it's only one aspect of human communication; and sometimes the biggest miscommunications occur when people think they understand each other perfectly."

Well, no danger of that in this.
posted by el io at 12:42 PM on December 16, 2014

Jesus, it's not like learning a different language is particularly difficult. It takes a bit of time and effort. I can read the French newspaper thanks to a few years in high school spent studying that language, and I became a translator in Japanese after mastering the language as an adult.

In any use case for this technology that I can think of, people should be able to knuckle down and learn at least the basics.

And there are enough common languages out there (English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese) that it seems highly unlikely that two speakers of "niche" languages (eg, Finnish and Turkish) are not going to share a common language.

Like, what is the use case? It certainly can't be for business, since no competent businessperson is going to rely on machine translation to manage a relationship or negotiate a deal.

It seems like a gimmick for a product (Skype) that frankly isn't all that relevant anymore in the era of highly secure and private WebRTC and other competing platforms.
posted by Nevin at 1:09 PM on December 16, 2014

Someday surprisingly soon we'll look back on these times when there wasn't instant translation available all the time (and global internet connectivity, and wireless charging, &c, &c) and shake our heads.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:13 PM on December 16, 2014

There are two elements to this: one is simultaneous translation (i.e., translation while you're speaking) and machine translation (i.e., translation by computer algorithms). It sounds like Microsoft has advanced the simultaneous translation part very far; not so much the machine translation part.
posted by Cash4Lead at 1:37 PM on December 16, 2014

Well great for you and my father-in-law. Some of us have spent years trying to learn languages unsuccessfully. So, there's that you know.

I am pretty sure you can master the basic communicative patterns this machine translation is going to produce.

I think this will probably work well in situations where clear, concise, non-colloquial, basic sentence patterns are being used, where the language pairs share a similar grammatical structure, e.g., English<>German.

But it's not going to work where the two languages are radically different, such as English<>Korean. Japan<>Korean maybe (the two languages are very similar).

With English as a lingua franca for business communications, I still cannot understand how this technology would be used.
posted by Nevin at 1:51 PM on December 16, 2014

> "... what is the use case?"

This is one of the strangest comments I have ever seen. You honestly cannot imagine a situation in which two people who do not share a common language might wish to communicate on a basic level?
posted by kyrademon at 1:57 PM on December 16, 2014 [13 favorites]

Frankly, I wish people who DO share a common language could communicate on a basic level.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:59 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

*Lieutenant Uhura rolls her eyes and chuckles...*
posted by Quasimike at 2:55 PM on December 16, 2014

Will they get rid of that weirdly engineered sound that's on every Skype communication, which sounds like Ash from Alien when he's just a head drooling milk as he talks? Because that would be great.
posted by yesster at 3:11 PM on December 16, 2014

Was it Virtual Light that there was a throwaway line about how Internatiional business calls are translated on the fly but it's not perfect so everyone has to talk in a very stilted, stylized, simplified version of thier own language and people who did this a lot found it creeping into day to day life?
posted by The Whelk at 3:45 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

This makes me kind of sad for some reason. I'm still trying to find a practical use for having spent years studying Russian and Mandarin Chinese to fluency. Fortunately, I enjoyed it for its own sake, but sometimes I still hold some hope that it would end up helping me in my professional career, or opening up some new opportunity to me, or something. Nope.

I don't know where the myth that learning foreign languages helps you find a job came from. The only job it helps you find is that of a translator from that language to your own language. People who get sent to foreign countries on business usually never learn the language of that country, unless that country speaks English.
posted by pravit at 4:41 PM on December 16, 2014

This is amazing and all, but...

As they’ve been testing Microsoft Skype Translator Preview, Microsoft Research has learned about the very nature of conversation and how it really works. “People often speak in partial sentences [and] interrupt each other. What are the units of meaning in those utterances?” They realized that Skype Translator has to understand the rhythm and intonation in communication.

This is the field-of-linguistics equivalent of saying "During testing, they learned about the very nature of mechanics and how things moved. Objects don't only move when pushed -- there's something called inertia that keeps them in motion. Resistance from the medium they're moving through can also slow them down." I mean, yes, report it, many people are under the misapprehension that they speak in complete sentences... but surely they didn't learn this stuff during testing.
posted by No-sword at 4:58 PM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Lots of thoughts:

Because I feel pretty confident Magyarul is going to be way, way down on the development list

Microsoft already have English-Hungarian translation (although I assume it's not very good), it would be a matter of adding speech recognition.

Wow .. This is really interesting. Who knew NLP has moved this far along.

It's interesting in that it combines speech recognition with machine translation but the individual parts have been at a reasonable standard in consumer products for a long time now.

"I would like a cheeseburger and the location of the nearest bathroom guided by a Grizzly Bear."

Ha, the first thing I thought of "The cheese is old and moldy. Where is the bathroom?" - close enough...

It would be hilarious if some honest translation crept in there due to machine learning without any human editorial intervention. I mean maybe not as blatant as "I think we should see other people" being translated as "I've been banging your sibling for weeks", or "We must get together sometime" as "with luck I'll never see your face again"; but perhaps more basic truths like "we'll call you" when said in a particular manner being translated as "we've already ruled you out".

Hilarious but very unlikely. The main reason we've made progress in machine translation is we've mostly ignored the Chomskyish 'artificial intelligence'/understanding approach in favour of something closer to 'very good pattern matching trained on tons of data' which is unlikely to make any abstract leaps without being extensively trained to do so.

Jesus, it's not like learning a different language is particularly difficult.

Maybe for you. For me it's the most difficult thing a human can do. I can't think of anything else I've tried to do that had a steeper learning curve. I don't generalise from my experiences however.

It seems like a gimmick for a product (Skype) that frankly isn't all that relevant anymore in the era of highly secure and private WebRTC and other competing platforms.

Skype is a horrible app, but it has an enormous userbase that's still growing healthily in both user numbers and minutes of usage. Craft beer is cool but I'd never say that Bud Lite isn't relevant.
posted by kersplunk at 5:46 PM on December 16, 2014

Come to Juiz de Fora, Brasil, Nevin, and show me where all the English speakers are. Seriously. I'm here the rest of the week. Outside of my host and a few of his colleagues, English is not common here. It is not common in much of Brasil. It's pretty clear to me what some use-cases for this technology might be, particularly when it's in my pocket.
posted by wintermind at 5:50 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

What would the use-case be, then? I cannot think of it. What are you doing in Brasil?

People who get sent to foreign countries on business usually never learn the language of that country, unless that country speaks English.

Yeah, that's expat life. It's all about being cocooned inside the foreign host (to mix metaphors).

Unless I am mistaken, this Skype thing is not a portable translator. It's not going to help you indicate to a taxi driver where you want to go, or help you ask someone for directions, right? Because there are these things called "phrase books" that can help you do that.

I tell my sons that there is absolutely no goddamn excuse to say "I can't do that" about anything, by the way. They are trilingual so far, and they will hopefully learn new languages along the way.

They speak French, so Spanish is a good next step. And if you speak Spanish and French, how hard can Portuguese be? They also speak Japanese, so conversational Korean should be easy enough to pick up.

A lot of people seem to think that speaking different languages has some practical value, like getting a government job. But it's about more than that. It's about interacting with the world around you, and learning about different points of view.

Anyway, I still can't see the purpose of this Skype translator thing. If anyone has a genuine use case (it's not a portable universal translator, right?), I would be interested to hear it.
posted by Nevin at 6:16 PM on December 16, 2014

Anyway, I still can't see the purpose of this Skype translator thing. If anyone has a genuine use case

My daughter speaks spanish (predominantly) and my parents speak english. This would allow my parents to have some semblance of a conversation with their grandkid.
posted by dhruva at 7:53 PM on December 16, 2014

I'd love something like this as a physician.
posted by gramcracker at 9:13 PM on December 16, 2014

> "If anyone has a genuine use case (it's not a portable universal translator, right?), I would be interested to hear it."

You have just moved to Inner Flerbovia for work a month ago. Your internet goes down, and you are on the phone with the service provider, attempting to explain that you have already cycled the power and perhaps the problem might be on their end. You have been learning Flerbovian, but the ability to ask "Where is the train station?", which is about what you've gotten to, is not really helping you here.

You are finally traveling to the Republic of Blah. You want to call your cousins there to make arrangements. They don't speak your language. You do not speak Blah.

You are playing a computer game with people around the world. The player from North Chevyimpala would like to warn you about the sniper on that building over there. You would like to say thank you.

Etc.
posted by kyrademon at 3:08 AM on December 17, 2014

where the language pairs share a similar grammatical structure, e.g., English<>German.

What hippybear said. Have you even looked at the German verb? Also, der die das die, den die das die, dem den dem den, des der des der. Got that? Congratulations! You have now got half a handle on the word "the".
posted by Wolof at 3:58 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

To be fair, from a global perspective, German is really quite similar to English, even if it has retained a lot more morphology. It just looks super different within the limited context of Western Europe, where virtually all of the languages are closely related due to historical accident. Kind of like how fans of an obscure music genre detect enormous differences between artists even though to outsiders it all sounds alike.
posted by No-sword at 4:43 AM on December 17, 2014

Yeah, English is pretty much what happens when German and French get together and have a baby who can't spell. And then they're always like, why can't you be more like your nice cousin Dutch, and English says, you two are never proud of me, I'm the official language of more then 60 sovereign states and one of the most commonly spoken second languages in the world, Dutch is spoken in, what, the Netherlands and parts of Belgium and Suriname? And then French says, don't you brag to me about being a lingua franca, young lady, they named the term lingua franca after me, and English is like, I'm not a lady, for the last time, I've dropped grammatical gender, and German says, not in my language family you haven't, I know you have modern ideas but there are rules. To hell with your rules, English says, what did they ever get me but weak and strong conjugation classes, and French interrupts and says well maybe you'd have a more coherent grammatical system if you weren't whoring around with every language that flutters its eyelashes at you, don't think I don't know what you've been doing with Spanish lately. And English says, oh, because you're such a pure language? That's rich. And German says, don't you talk about your parent language that way, but English keeps going, English goes one step too far and says, French wouldn't even be around if Latin hadn't taken Gallic and -- Whack! German slaps English across the face! French is crying and can't stop, and English storms off yelling, and German wants to console French but doesn't know how, they've always been just across a border but worlds apart, back in the Old Franconian days they seemed to have so much in common, but French has changed so much and German can't speak the language of Romance ...

I'm sorry, what were we talking about?
posted by kyrademon at 5:28 AM on December 17, 2014 [172 favorites]

omg please make this a real thing on YouTube.

THIS WOULD BE AWESOME! If I could convince my husband to be German and find someone (my roommate's girlfriend? She is good at languages) to be French I would totally be English. This would be so great!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:43 AM on December 17, 2014

Nevin: Google Translate on Android can basically replace phrase books, at least for a few languages it supports, and even speak the translation. It's half decent, but not great.

pravit: Fluency in Spanish is a requirement of my SO's current job.
posted by wierdo at 11:25 AM on December 17, 2014

Omg, that is such a BRILLIANT comment kyrademon!
posted by nickyskye at 2:17 PM on January 4, 2015

HOW DO I AUDITION
posted by scrump at 5:35 PM on January 5, 2015