Tower of Babel translator "dubs" conversations

Some US researchers at Carnegie Mellon University -- who have clearly missed the basic gist of most traditional tellings of the Tower of Babel story -- are working on a nifty new technology for automatically translating bilingual conversations. Instead of speaking into a device and then waiting for the unit to transform the audio into text, translate that text and then output the translation in audio form (ala IBM's recently rolled-out solution), the "Tower of Babel" translator allows the conversationalists to mouth the words they wish to speak, which it then translates on the fly and creates an audio overdub of the conversation. The upshot of this is that two people can "speak" to each other face to face in their own respective languages, with minimal delay or confusion. Electrodes are hooked up to the neck and face to sense the mouth movements, but unfortunately the system is still in its infancy. Currently it can handle a small vocabulary of 100-200 words at about 80% accuracy, and accuracy drops off significantly beyond that vocab. The system currently works with translating Chinese to English and English to Spanish or German. Obviously there's a long way to go, but we're looking forward to the day when we can all get along and chat it up Tower of Babel style -- heck, we might as well build a spankin' tall building while we're at it, yeah?

[Via Slashdot]

[KYDS3K @ Oct 27th 2006 3:20AM]

as a CMU grad, i have to be proud of this!!!

but i'd still rather just drop a fish in my ear. =)

[Reginald @ Oct 27th 2006 3:23AM]

Cool. The Babelfish is real!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babelfish

[James @ Oct 27th 2006 9:21AM]

This is just perfect for anyone who needs to call Indian tech support. The one thing they need to perfect is "redneck to Hindi". Perfect that, and no one will need translations anymore! They'll make BILLIONS!

[Eric @ Oct 27th 2006 10:39AM]

Reminds me of a story about a team who created a computer that could translate back and forth between Chinese and English. For their demonstration to the public, they put in the words, "Out of sight, out of mind." It was translated into Chinese. They took the result of that translation, in Chinese, and ran it through the computer the other way.

The result?

"Invisible Idiot."

:-D

[JC @ Oct 27th 2006 10:55AM]

Anybody watch "How William Shatner Changed the World"?

Another example of Star Trek driving technological advances. Universal translator, anyone?

[apt34 @ Oct 27th 2006 12:39PM]

indeed, the first thing I thought of... the only thing to make it more like the universal translator would have to be that it can translate any language it encounters, as the universal translator does not depend on any built-in vocabulary

[JS @ Oct 27th 2006 12:32PM]

Cant wait for God to smite the CMU researchers for trying to do something like this. Looks like history does repeat itself. Some people never learn....

[JC @ Oct 27th 2006 12:52PM]

Baby steps. :)