July 11, 2006
Is VoIP-Based On-The-Fly Language Translation Possible?
Any sort of voice-based application is eventually going to beg the question of whether there is more than one language in use, and whether languages can be used interchangeably. In countries such as Canada and the United States, that have a sizable immigrant population, and where VoIP applications like Skype have really taken hold, this is an important question.
While many countries in Europe, Asia and Africa are officially bilingual, Canadians and Americans (and probably citizens of Australia, New Zealand and the U.K.), are for the most part unilingual, speaking primarily English. Some do speak French or Spanish as a first or second language. But there is a sizable portion of recent immigrants - particularly the young - or 1st- or 2nd-generation born, who may lose fluency with their mother/ heritage tongue, or never gain it in the first place.
It's often the latter citizens who while trying to uphold their culture and keep up contact with any family back home, often find a language gap. (Sociologists claim that clothing and then language are often the first characteristics of immigrants to change.) They'll speak in broken English blended with their mother/ heritage tongue, instead of fully in the latter. Technology such as VoIP-based language translation may be able to help them, or anyone else who wants or needs to communicate with people in another language.
For example, I can understand 95% of what is spoken to me in my mother tongue, but when I try to speak it, my words are often garbled. So if I want to converse over the phone with my grandmother, my words have to be translated to her. Or my grandmother has to do most of the talking and questioning. I respond to her in fragments, with poor tense and possessive nouns. But being the quiet woman my grandmother is, she won't do that. That means I rarely speak to her, beyond a hello.
No doubt I'm not the only North American to lament my lack of fluency in another language. There's a problem desiring a solution. So consider: what if you could simply speak English, or some other widely-spoken language, and your call would be translated on the fly? There already are voice-to-text and text-to-voice translators in several languages, as well as language-to-language text translators. The next step is to efficiently translate voice-to-voice in two or more languages. Universal translators anyone?
While universal translators to cover every Earth language may be improbable, natural language processing and speech recognition could foreseeably be combined to offer on-the-fly translation between two to five languages simultaneously - especially between languages that are closely related to each other. In a nutshell, language translation works on grammar trees. Once the grammar trees of two languages are properly paired, it's easier to write software to do the translation.
True, there are translation issues such as the difference between colloquial language and literal meaning to be worked out. That is not an easy or even short-term process. Also, processing power and grammar tree storage space are factors. But VoIP-based systems are far more likely to achieve speech translation than PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) ever could.
Seems to me like there's an application opportunity just waiting to happen. And not just once - over and over in different pairings of languages. All someone has to come up with as a starting point is some VoIP- and XML-based protocol that everyone else can follow, hopefully in an open-standard that can be shared.
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