Facebook already connects hundreds of millions of users around the globe, and the site itself has been translated into more than 70 different languages. Now, it looks like the popular website may take its efforts to break down language barriers between users to another level by offering automatic translations for comments.

At the moment, the feature is only available to some users. When it’s active, it allows users to see translated versions of comments written in an unfamiliar language, as well to switch back and forth between the translation and the original comment. The translation program doesn’t work all the time, but when it does work it is apparently even able to translate some slang terms. So far, it’s been spotted translating Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

The new feature is geared toward businesses and is only available on Facebook Pages operated by businesses and celebrities. Inside Facebook, which broke the story, explains the appeal:

But you can still see how there are some potentially very big use cases here. Page owners, especially for popular international icons, are deluged by comments across the languages that Facebook now supports. Chances are they don’t understand everything every fan has been saying, so they’ve had to rely on Google Translate or other tools instead. As the feature is only working for Pages now, Facebook seems to be focusing on solving that problem.

If this feature gets rolled out more fully, it will be undoubtedly be a boon to busy page owners. However, as with any automatic translation technology, care must be taken to seek outside help and clarification when necessary. This should be great for getting the “gist” of what your commenters are saying, but in a tricky customer service situation, you might want to consult a professional, especially if you and your customer don’t seem to be communicating very well.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Facebook Translates Comments

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Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in technological fields including speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. He also believes one day soon, computers will develop their own consciousness and superhuman levels of intelligence. In fact, in an interview with the Huffington Post, Kurzweil told industry guru Nataly Kelly that he believes computers will be able to translate as well as human translators by 2029.

At the moment, it’s obvious that machine translation has a way to go. But it’s improving all the time,and what if Kurzweil is right? Is there a future for translators in the brave new world he predicts? Fortunately, the answer is yes.  Kurzweil says that:

“These technologies don’t replace whole fields, in general. What they do is replace a certain way of applying them.”

The translation field is always changing, but translation companies that are willing to change with the times should have no problem thriving, according to Kurzweil:

“These tools are going to increase our ability to use, create, understand, manipulate and translate language. The idea is not to resist the tools, but to use them to do more.”

Kurzweil goes on to compare the advances he expects to occur in machine translation to the invention of the electronic synthesizer in the music industry- instead of replacing real live musicians, the synthesizer became another tool in the musicians’ arsenal.

Similarly, Kurzweil understands that translation is an art form, calling it

“the most high-level type of work one can imagine. The epitome of human intelligence is our ability to command language. That is why Alan Turing based the Turing test, which is a test of whether or not a computer is operating at human levels, on a command of language.”

We can live with that!

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | The Future of Translation

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Just last year, the Alutiiq, a group of Native Americans who live on the coasts of Alaska, were in danger of losing their language, the Kodiak dialect of Alutiiq, completely. The dialect is down to about 50 living speakers.

For the past four years, however, the Alutiiq Museum has been working on a project to document and preserve the language. Called Living Words, the project involves talking with and recording the elders who can still speak Alutiiq.

But in addition to documenting the language as it exists today, the Alutiiq are also looking to the future by adding new words.  According to the Kodiak Daily Mirror, tribal elders have been holding “New Words Councils” to create words for modern phenomena like text messages and ATVs.

The full list of new words is available here, and it’s definitely an interesting read. The list shows the words in English, the Alutiiq translation, and a “literal translation” that gives clues as to why that word was chosen.

For example, the Internet is translated as “Iwa’isuute,” which means “the searcher.” “Computer” is “umiartusqa,” a “thing that thinks.”

About half of the elders who speak Kodiak Alutiiq met recently for the Alutiiq Language Summit to discuss more new words and to talk about the future of the language now that the grant that supported the Living Words project has run out.

During the keynote address, project leader April Counceller vowed to continue the New Words Council, saying:

“Other groups that are interested in new words creation can now look to our example and see how a group can start out, just like ours, and create a successful and stable community within just a few years. We need to be proud of the Elders and the learners who make up this committee and find ways to continue the New Words Council, since there will never be a lack of needed new words for our language.”

Of course, creating new words for an old language is futile if nobody uses them. Fortunately, efforts are also underway to get the tribe’s youth to learn the language. The Kodiak Alutiiq Village of Afognak teaches the language to preschoolers, offers an after school immersion program and holds an annual youth camp. And Kodiak High School will be offering a class in Alutiiq this year at the request of the students.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Kodiak Alutiiq Speakers Reinvent Their Language

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Adam Wooten, a translation expert with Globalization Group, was pleased when a local magazine published an article he wrote about the importance of obtaining accurate, professional translations for companies doing business overseas.

He became much less pleased, however, when he received a copy of the magazine and skimmed over the article. Someone at the magazine had decided to “enhance” the article by translating the title, “Lost Into Translation”, into several different languages. In the Deseret News, Wooten writes:

“I became concerned when I saw large, bright, red text splashed across both pages in six languages. Where did these multilingual phrases originate? I knew Globalization Group, the translation company where I work, had not provided any translations…something about them did not look right.”

Yep, you guessed it. The magazine’s staff, perhaps operating under the tyranny of the deadline, had simply plugged the title into Google Translate. Even worse, since Google Translate’s database includes translated material like movie titles, the Chinese characters the magazine ended up using actually meant “Lost Tokyo,” which is the title that the 2003 Bill Murray movie “Lost in Translation” was released under in China. Whoops!

It’s hard not to laugh at the irony, especially since over-reliance on tools like Google Translate is one of the things that Wooten warns about in the article, which someone on the magazine’s design team apparently didn’t read very closely.  Of course, the situation is less funny for Wooten, who now has to worry about clients who might think that the faulty translations came from his company instead of from the bowels of Google Translate’s database.

Machine translation may be free, but Wooten correctly explains its limitations in a deliciously sarcastic response to the offending magazine:

“While useful for some situations, like getting the “gist” of low-value, user-generated text on a social-networking site, machine translation is usually not appropriate for legally and financially sensitive information, marketing text that attracts and retains customers or — hypothetically speaking — magazine articles that explain how to obtain high-quality human translation to preserve brand strength.”

So remember, if you’re playing on Facebook or Twitter, machine translation is fine – but leave the important stuff to the professionals!

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Magazine Illustrates Language Expert’s Article With Bungled Translations

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The quest for a machine that can reliably translate between one language and another has been going on since 1954, when IBM translated the first pieces of text from English to Russian. Obviously, a “universal translator” would be a tremendous asset to the military, especially as they often have a scarcity of competent interpreters.

Machine translation has progressed by leaps and bounds, but a truly dependable “universal translator” has not yet been developed. However, the US Department of Defense is not giving up. Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, has requested $15 million from the US Congress for a “ Boundless Operational Language Translation” system.

Why can’t the Pentagon just use Google Translate for free? Well, as cool as Google’s technology is, it’s still prone to failure. For example, Technorati’s Translation Guy tested out Google’s Translation iPhone app with hilarious results, as the question “where’s the bathroom?” came out “The bathroom is here” when Google was done rendering it into Japanese.

The US Defense Department isn’t just out to best Google, though. Per Wired, they also want their BOLT to “enable sophisticated search of stored language information and analysis of the information by increasing the capability of machines for deep language comprehension.”

How is Darpa planning to build this miraculous device? According to Wired:

“All Darpa proposes that it needs to do, for starters, is teach a machine how to deal with the non-programmatic aspects of speech — bad syntax, poor diction, slang, accents — that a strictly logical order processes as incomprehensible anomalies. Then it has to “enable machines to carry on multi-modal dialogues with humans and to comprehend concepts and generate responses in multilingual environments.”

Sounds to me like what they’re looking for is a protocol droid. Send in C3PO!

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | US Department of Defense Seeks Universal Translator

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Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” However, according to NPR, that hasn’t stopped Google from attempting to translate poetry using their Google Translate machine translation service.

Google research scientist  Dmitriy Genzel told NPR that he considers effectively translating poetry to be the ultimate challenge, saying the attempt is “what we call AI complete. Which means it’s as difficult as anything we can attempt in artificial intelligence.”

What makes it so difficult? According to Carl Sandburg, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” How do you translate that? It’s a challenge even for knowledgeable human translators to create a translation that captures both the rhythm of a poem and the layers of meaning it contains.

Google has managed to create a program that does a pretty good job of capturing the rhythm and meter of a poem. Genzel told NPR that:

“there’s quite a big aspect of [poetry translation] that machines can do pretty well. It’s not such a human endeavor as people might think.”

But rhyming has proved harder, as the system can only cycle through a list of potential matches, making for a slow and inaccurate process. Even harder than that, I’d imagine, is capturing the subtle nuance of poetic language, as well as accurately translating figurative language and figures of speech. That’s why human translation is generally superior to machine translation and is likely to remain so for the near future.

Still, Genzel points out that trying to translate poetry via machine could have additional benefits if it leads to the improvement of existing machine translation services. This would allow people more easily  “cross the language barrier” when it comes to gathering news and information. He observes that:

“even for English speakers, there’s a huge amount of stuff on the Web that you don’t have access to. If you read a news article about some country, you bet if you open their news site — which may not be in English — and read that, you’ll get huge understanding that people don’t really see things in the same way.”

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Google Translate to Tackle Poetry

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Given the importance that technology has in any organisation, our IT Manager David Brooks and myself were sent to Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Berlin. Our goal was to learn, research and connect with like minded people and to bring back new ideas and technology. Like many trips, there was not much time left to explore. This was a shame as my little sister is half German (a long story!) which has created a heightened interest for me in anything German.

As with most things in life, the IT world has its own fashions and this year the buzz was surrounding cloud computing, virtualization and the new Windows Phone 7. The phone stand was very popular and was attracting a large number of people waving their business cards in the faint chance of winning one. Unfortunately, I was not one of the lucky people, better luck next time I hope!

Now that we are back in the office, it is time to put what we have learnt into practice. For me this is focused on our client facing systems in order to allow us to integrate our translation work-flow directly with our clients. Unfortunately, this is not a one size fits all solution, serious customisation is often needed, utilising a wide variety of technologies. This is why events such as TechEd are so useful, you can talk about the technical aspects of your solution with other experts who can point you in the direction of resources you may not have been aware of.

Finally, although not unexpected, the entire conference was conducted in English. Despite the location, German was nowhere to be heard and only seen on signs in the Messe conference centre. I’d be curious to know how other delegates who do not have English as their first language felt about this?

Hopefully I’ll be able to report back from TechEd USA in Atlanta next year… wink wink

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Microsoft TechEd Berlin

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Generally speaking, it’s never a good idea to sign something you can’t read. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for international travelers to be asked to do just that, and it’s something that can definitely come back and haunt you later.

For example, the Houston Chronicle interviewed Haroldy Woods, a Texas flight attendant whose travel agent advised her to purchase a Deutsche BahnCard to save money on a train ticket. Woods bought the card because she trusted the travel agent, but she couldn’t read the application, which was all in German. So, she didn’t realize that the membership would automatically renew unless she canceled it. Three years later, a collection agency came calling for her unpaid membership dues.

Woods called the situation “such an injustice,” telling the Chronicle:

“The agent never mentioned any recurring charges or annual renewal fees, and I couldn’t read the application in German.”

What can you do to avoid having this happen to you? The obvious answer is to simply not sign anything without a translation, but that’s not always an option. For example, the Chronicle interviewed another woman who watched as TAM Airlines made her friend sign a “declaration of responsibilities” contract in Portuguese, which her friend could not read. The only alternative to not signing it would have been to miss the flight.

In some cases, modern technology may be able to help. For example, if you have a digital copy of the document and an Internet connection, tools like Google Translate can give you the “gist” of a document.  Remember, though, that machine translation is in its infancy still, so don’t expect it to be entirely accurate. If you have a smart phone, there are also a few apps that can provide similarly shaky translations.

If you don’t have a translation available, though, you’ll just have to use your best judgment.  Caveat emptor!

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Lack of Translated Documents a Problem for International Travelers

Copyright © 2010 K International the #1 choice of business and government for language translation services.

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The debate over machine-produced versus human translation took the British Colombian division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by surprise, according to an article in the Vancouver Sun. The BC Mounties were providing French translations of their press releases via Google Translate. However, after a recent, highly critical report from Radio-Canada sparked controversy, they will no longer offer Google Translate to translate press releases from French to English.

Here’s the unfortunate thing-since the British Colombian division of the RCMP does not have enough translators on staff, disabling the Google Translate option isn’t going to improve service to their French-speaking users. In fact, it will have quite the opposite effect, at least until a new translator is hired. The Google-provided translations were no doubt imperfect and clunky. They almost always are. However, they were generated instantly. Readers also had the option to request a human-translated version to be emailed to them, although that could take up to a month.

Technically, that doesn’t meet the requirements of the  Official Languages Act, which requires Canadian government agencies to communicate with citizens in both French and English. RCMP spokesman Insp. Tim Shields acknowledged as much in the Vancouver Sun. However, the practice at least allowed French speakers to get the gist of a press release without delays.

Now, as the RCMP tries to find another translator, the website will only offer French-speaking visitors the option to request a translation via email. Visitors who speak other languages will still be able to use Google Translate, as will French-speaking visitors with enough web savvy to cut and paste the release into Google Translate themselves.

At this time, human translation is more accurate than machine translation, and Francophone Canadians have a right to translations that are  both correct and provided in a timely manner. Until the RCMP gets another French translator, though, it seems a little silly to remove the Google Translate option.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | British Colombian Mounties Remove Google Translate From Website

Copyright © 2010 K International the #1 choice of business and government for language translation services.

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Facebook’s crowd-sourced translation app has helped the company translate Facebook into over 100 different languages quickly and cheaply. However, the company (and many of its users) just discovered one of the downsides of crowd-sourcing- vulnerability to online pranksters.

The problem was discovered on July 28th, when Spanish and Turkish-speaking Facebook users logged on to find their pages filled with profanity in both English and Spanish. For example, according to this article on The Register, the Turkish version of Facebook’s IM error message, which is supposed to read “Your message could not be sent because the recipient is offline,” was changed to say “ “Your message could not be sent because of your tiny penis.” That’s pretty much the only example that’s even printable.

Why did Facebook suddenly start cursing at its users?  Facebook’s translation app depends on users to vote for the most accurate translations for each piece of text. That works great, as long as the people are voting are honestly trying to be helpful. Unfortunately for Facebook, members of a Turkish online forum called Inci Sözlük worked together to create the profane “translations” and vote them up. This vulnerability is inherent in any sort of crowd-sourcing unless precautions are taken. For example, when young Canadian pop star Justin Bieber tried to “crowd-source” a stop on his world tour, his contest was hijacked by the internet pranksters at 4chan, who promptly voted to send him to North Korea.

Rik Ferguson, a security consultant at Trend Micro, told the Register that this prank should serve  as “teachable moment,” both for Facebook and for other companies that use crowd-sourcing:

“Perhaps it is fortunate that the hole has been exposed through a prank in the first instance and not something more nefarious. Any online service, whether it’s translation or reputation services, which solicits user generated content would be well advised to quality check that content before going live with it.”

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Crowd-Sourced Translation Goes Awry For Facebook

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