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building understanding .....

building understanding .....

Gollob points to a machine that easily fits in a bag the size of a woman's purse. It's a universal translator. It is being tested in Iraq by DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the legendary research and development works in Arlington where Gollob is a contractor.

The machine interprets the spoken word. You talk in English. It repeats whatever you said in spoken Iraqi Arabic. It then awaits a spoken response from the Iraqi, and talks back to you in English.

It's pretty good, says Mari Maeda, the program's manager. About 70 or 80 percent accurate. Not as good as a human. But the number of human interpreters willing to work around gunfire is finite.

DARPA is aiming to get an affordable iPod-size interpreter on the chest of every American warrior, foreshadowing the day such devices will be as common as music players.

Independently, Google is deploying its strikingly successful Translate project. It instantly translates text among 41 languages from Bulgarian to Hindi with surprising felicity. The big question is how soon Google will release a voice version, making the world's cellphones multilingual.

That sound you hear? It's the sound, after all these millennia, of the Tower of Babel rising once again.

* * *

On Jan. 7, 1954, IBM announced, with great fanfare: "Russian was translated into English by an electronic 'brain' today for the first time." Routine machine translation, we were told, was only five years away.

Half a century later, computers have mastered challenges that impress even geneticists, chess grandmasters and research librarians. But machines still have the devil's own time with routines common to any healthy 2-year-old. Becoming fluent with languages, for example.

To this day, if you want to get a translation absolutely right, go find yourself a talented human.

"Nuclear power," says Kevin Hendzel, a spokesman for the American Translators Association, when asked of areas where you want tremendously good human translation. "Negotiations for disarmament. The pharmaceutical industry. Zero-error work with millions of dollars" riding on the outcome. Hendzel has served as an interpreter on the presidential hot line.

The trouble with meticulous, culturally sensitive human translation, of course, is that it is slow, pricey and rare.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052104697_pf.html

twitterring on the edge of being a complete twit...

 

US students hope to bring Twitterature to the masses

Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman aim to squish literary classics into series of tweets

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

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Next, your life compressed to 20 words (120 characters) or about... You're worth 10 or less, you say? Tell that to the worms... and the dust pans. It's called a twitterpitaph...

of words and of misuse...

From Robert Fisk...

Still scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon? Or so the king is said to have enraged the odiferous man who described the rise and fall of the Roman hegemon.

Yes, I use this word advisedly since we are at the mercy of those who will misuse language for their own advantage or because laptops have made them sloppy or because they think it chic to befuddle us with psycho-crap. For the latter, I draw your attention to a new publisher – Corvus – whose "publishing director", one Nicolas Cheetham, was stupid enough to send me his "launch catalogue" the other day.

Corvus, he informs me, is the Latin for raven. No problem there. But then he goes on: "Our books are diverse in setting, tone and genre ... Corvus takes a particular delight in patrolling those fertile zones of convergence at genre borders, where the best stories are to be found..." Ye gods, where do people like young Cheetham – for young he must be to write such twaddle – come from? "Patrolling ... fertile zones of convergence at genre borders" simply means nothing on this earth.

But it is intended to impress, isn't it? To make us believe that Master Cheetham is clever, nuanced, even – heaven spare us – literate. It is meant to make us believe that he is a Deep Thinker, that Corvus is appealing to the super-educated, those who "push the envelope", who talk the non-language of BBC management and New Labour; it was, after all, not surprising that the BBC's top crap-talk specialist ended up working for Tony Blair.

Then there's what I call the give-away word – the one word in a sentence that reveals the unwillingness of the writer or speaker to own up to a fault. My favourite just now is "any". As in British Airways' apology to "any passengers who may have been inconvenienced" by having their baggage lost at Terminal 5.

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