Communications of the ACM
Translation Technologies Advancing Rapidly, Expert Says
"It is possible to create natural, seamless communication without the requirement for everyone to know a common language," says Professor Alexander Waibel.
Credit: International Center for Advanced Communication Technology
Automatic translation technologies are swiftly advancing to the point where a classroom of speakers of different languages could hear the lecture in their native dialect, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Alexander Waibel, director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies. Speaking at Carnegie Mellon Qatar, Waibel said that "it is possible to create natural, seamless communication without the requirement for everyone to know a common language."
Waibel noted that only 41 percent of the European population has English fluency, while only 30 percent of online content is in English. Nearly 100 percent of translation is performed by humans today, though the actual translation work is presently only about 10 percent of translatable text. There are 400,000 translators, of which 150,000 are based in Europe.
However, less than 1 percent of the 300,000 conferences held in Europe each year are translated. Among the automatic translation technologies Waibel demonstrated at the lecture was Jibbigo, an English-Spanish speech translator commercially available for the iPhone 3G that features an expandable 40,000-word vocabulary. Waibel also screened videos of simultaneous automatic, two-language text translation demos of several speeches given in the European Parliament.
From Gulf Times (Qatar)
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