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Part 1: The Quest for a Universal Translator
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"Come si traduce 'ain't' in italiano? È inglese o americano?"
AERDNA74
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In a test last summer, Alexander Graethe of the European Media Lab in Heidelberg, Germany, trudged through the rain-swept streets of the city, asking directions from locals, with the aid of a talking machine stashed in his backpack.
It translated his questions into German, then dictated people's answers back to him in English. It even plotted his course on a map display strapped to his arm.
Meanwhile, his colleagues booked flights and hotel rooms with PCs, using the same software.
"Please reserve two rooms for me at the Dom Hotel in Limburg, Thursday to Sunday" would come out the other end of the phone as "Ich moechte zwei Zimmer im Dom-Hotel in Limburg bestellen, von Donnerstag bis Sonntag."
One of the masterminds behind this attempt at computer translation is Alexander Waibel, the director of Carnegie Mellon's Interactive Systems Lab.
His own bilingual existence, which requires shuttling back and forth between Pittsburgh and the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, has made him painfully aware of the difficulties involved. The trial conducted in Pittsburgh; Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, Germany; Grenoble, France; Kyoto, Japan; Trento, Italy; and Taejon, South Korea was a showcase for C-STAR, an international collaboration of researchers who are trying to get computers to understand spoken words well enough to render them in another language.
And it was a small but notable step toward creating a universal translator: a machine that allows seamless conversations between people, or between people and machines, regardless of language or software.
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