EUROPA & TC-STAR
Filed Under Best Bytes
EUROPA is a site dedicated to language learning, teaching, and translation in the European Union. Multi-lingualism is a priority in the EU, but interestingly, English, French, German, Spanish and Russian still represent over 95 % of languages taught. Apparently learning Chinese is as much a novelty over there as it is here..
The site links to TC-STAR, which features an initiative to rapidly improve speech-to-speech technologies. Their intro here:
The TC-STAR project, financed by European Commission within the Sixth Program, is envisaged as a long-term effort to advance research in all core technologies for Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST). SST technology is a combination of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Translation (SLT) and Text to Speech (TTS) (speech synthesis). The objectives of the project are ambitious: making a breakthrough in SST that significantly reduces the gap between human and machine translation performance.
From what I can see, if this project stays on track (focused mainly on European Spanish, European English, and Mandarin Chinese), we could see some amazing technology in the next five to six years that would enable us to “speak/hear in tongues”. So keep your eyes out for translation products that could potentially impact “face-to-face and over-the-phone use, speeches, documents (or web sites), cross lingual retrieval in audio streams, etc.”
I think the face to face would be most interesting. Imagine taking your iPhone with you to another country, enabling a certain language pair, and then having native speakers speak close enough to your phone mic that you could listen to their input as well as a real time translation, probably in the the voice of ALEX’s son.
Comments
There is a non-technological solution to the language barrier, and that lies in Esperanto, which really does allow people to “speak/hear in tongues”. Esperanto is no linguistic panacaea, but it is becoming widely used. Take a look at www.esperanto.net