A man from South Africa speaks Sepedi to a Peruvian woman who knows only Quechua, yet they can understand each other.
The universal translator is a staple of science fiction, but Google, Meta and others are locked in a battle to get as many languages as possible working with their AI models.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that his firm now had a block of 200 languages that could be translated into each other, doubling the number in just two years.
Photo: Screen grab
Meta’s innovation, trumpeted in 2020, was to break the link with English — long a conduit language because of the vast availability of sources.
Instead, Meta’s models go direct from, say, Chinese to French without going through English.
In May, Google announced its own great leap forward, adding 24 languages to Google Translate after pioneering techniques to reduce noise in the samples of lesser-used languages.
Sepedi and Quechua, of course, were among them — so the Peruvian and the South African could now communicate, but so far only with text.
Researchers warn that the dream of a real-time conversation translator is still some way off.
QUALITY VS QUANTITY
Both Google and Meta have business motivations for their research, not least because the more people using their tools, the better the data to feed back into the AI loop. They are also in competition with the likes of Microsoft, which has a paid-for translator, and DeepL, a popular web-based tool that focuses on fewer languages than its rivals.
The challenge of automatic translation is “particularly important” for Facebook because of the hate speech and inappropriate content it needs to filter, researcher Francois Yvon said.
The tool would help English-speaking moderators, for example, to identify such content in many other languages.
Meta’s promotional videos, however, focus on the liberating aspects of the technology — amateur chefs having recipes from far and wide appearing at their fingertips.
But both companies are also at the forefront of AI research, and both accompanied their announcements with academic papers that highlight their ambitions.
The Google paper, titled “Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages,” makes clear that the firm is not satisfied with the 133 languages it already features on Google Translate.
However, as the cliche goes, quantity does not always mean quality.
EUROPEAN PRIMACY
“We should not imagine that the 200x200 language pairs will be at the same level of quality,” said Yvon of Facebook’s model. European languages, for example, would probably always have an advantage simply because there are more reliable sources.
As regular users of tools such as Google Translate and other automatic program will attest, the text produced can be robotic and mistakes are not uncommon.
While this may not be a problem for day-to-day use of restaurant menus, it does limit the utility of those tools.
“When you’re working on the translation of an assembly manual for a fighter jet, you can’t afford a single mistake,” said Vincent Godard, who runs French tech firm Systran.
And the ultimate nut to crack is inventing a tool that can seamlessly translate the spoken word.
“We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it,” said Antoine Bordes, who runs Fair, Meta’s AI research lab.
He said Meta’s speech translation project works on far fewer languages at the moment.
“But the interest will be in connecting the two projects, so that one day we will be able to speak in 200 languages while retaining intonations, emotions, accents,” he said.
Oct. 14 to Oct. 20 After working above ground for two years, Chang Kui (張桂) entered the Yamamoto coal mine for the first time, age 16. It was 1943, and because many men had joined the war effort, an increasing number of women went underground to take over the physically grueling and dangerous work. “As soon as the carts arrived, I climbed on for the sake of earning money; I didn’t even feel scared,” Chang tells her granddaughter Tai Po-fen (戴伯芬) in The last female miner: The story of Chang Kui (末代女礦工: 張桂故事), which can be found on the Frontline
There is perhaps no better way to soak up the last of Taipei’s balmy evenings than dining al fresco at La Piada with a sundowner Aperol Spritz and a luxuriant plate of charcuterie. La Piada (義式薄餅) is the brainchild of Milano native William Di Nardo. Tucked into an unassuming apartment complex, fairy lights and wining diners lead the way to this charming slice of laid-back Mediterranean deli culture. Taipei is entirely saturated with Italian cuisine, but La Piada offers something otherwise unseen on the island. Piadina Romagnola: a northern Italian street food classic. These handheld flatbreads are stuffed with cold
President William Lai’s (賴清德) National Day speech was exactly what most of us expected. It was pleasant, full of keywords like “resilience” and “net zero” and lacked any trolling of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Of course the word “Taiwan” popped up often, and Lai reiterated the longtime claim of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a claim that now dates back 30 years on the pro-Taiwan side. But it was gentle. Indeed, it was possible to see the speech as conciliatory, leaving room for the PRC to make a gesture. That may have been one of its purposes: if
In the tourism desert that is most of Changhua County, at least one place stands out as a remarkable exception: one of Taiwan’s earliest Han Chinese settlements, Lukang. Packed with temples and restored buildings showcasing different eras in Taiwan’s settlement history, the downtown area is best explored on foot. As you make your way through winding narrow alleys where even Taiwanese scooters seldom pass, you are sure to come across surprise after surprise. The old Taisugar railway station is a good jumping-off point for a walking tour of downtown Lukang. Though the interior is not open to the public, the exterior