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Copier Auto-Translates Japanese to English

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Sep 27, 2007 09:56 PM
from the hopefully-better-than-babelfish dept.
Printers Hardware
StCredZero writes "Wild. Fuji has created a photocopier that automatically translates documents from Japanese to English. That's pretty nuts. Apparently, the copier can figure out what sections are text, OCR the text, send it to a translation engine, and put the english back into place."
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Submission: Copier that Auto-Translates Japanese to English by StCredZero (169093)
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  • All the cartoon drawings... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Turn into actual pictures of people, too! Amazing!

    • Re:All the cartoon drawings... (Score:4, Funny)

      by rde (17364) on Friday September 28 2007, @04:34AM (#20779903)
      Ooh, I hope not. If it does, then it means that it's got a real prediliction towards anime. That could produce some interesting translations, such as...

      Dear Sir,
      Your opponent is me! With regard to your memo dated 14th inst., I'll never forgive you, vampire bastard! Super ultra science business meeting, engage!
      Noooooooooooooooo!

      Yours faithfully,
      Bob Morton
      Chief Gundam Officer

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by The Spoonman (634311)
        Or..."all your base are belong to us. Make your plan."

        This copier thing sucks, though. It eliminates my ability to use an analogy that's near and dear to my heart. When I build a server, I use a base image. I've had many, many people tell me stupid things like "Oh, I don't use images. Sometimes when you use images, things get all out of sync and they're not consistent." Uh, yeah they are, idiot. That's the whole point of using an image. When I build a new server, the only thing that differs betwe
        • Its powder level! It's over 9000!

          (I tried so hard not to rise to the bait... I honestly did. Then I thought of the power/powder pun and I couldn't stop. Damn you Psykechan! Damn you!

  • Not new (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:02PM (#20777977)
    They've been using this for years to translate instruction manuals.

  • Manga and Anime (Score:3, Insightful)

    by biocute (936687) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:11PM (#20777981) Homepage
    Imagine if you upload manga scans to Flickr, and it automatically translates them to English.

    Imagine if you upload anime to YouTube, and it automatically includes an English subtitle.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kandenshi (832555)
      Automatic english subtitles for an anime? That's more of a job for speech recognition software(which is also being worked on, one of the profs in my department had a friend working on Japanese to English speech recognition/translation many years ago).

      This OCR based stuff would still be handy for automatically translating manga I suppose though.
      I know that there are a few things out there in Japanese that haven't been released in English yet I wouldn't mind.

    • Re:Manga and Anime (Score:5, Informative)

      by dancingmad (128588) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:51PM (#20778297)
      Imagine if you upload anime to YouTube, and it automatically includes an English subtitle.

      Without the kanji, since a large number of Japanese words are homophones, I can't see this being practical in the near future. Text is different - with the kanji, it's not terribly difficult to look up the correct word and with kana grammar beside it, the task gets much easier. I can't see a machine understand a conversation in context, however.

  • I just photocopied this article (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spy Hunter (317220) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:13PM (#20777991) Journal
    StCredZero "writes wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. With respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, to send that to the translation engine, and in the place English". You reset, or can grasp.
    • That's pretty much what it would be like. Machine translation in general is an extremely difficult problem, and I don't expect to see decent Japanese-English translation software during my lifetime. Nothing less than true artificial intelligence will be required.
      • Thanks to that, people like me (translators, though I'm still in the making) will still find a job in the foreseeable future :D
      • Machine translation has been making great strides in the past few years. You might not see it with sites like babelfish or google translate, but some of the upcoming research systems do quite a good job of accurately translating between langauges. The output might not flow as well as you'd get from a human, but the ideas do get reliably translated between languages. I think it's quite reasonable to think we'll see really usable machine translation software in common use within 10 years.

        Now getting the co

      • Re:I just photocopied this article (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Helios1182 (629010) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:29PM (#20778127)
        Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement. It just happens that the general public doesn't have access to the state of the art research. Systems are improving all of the time. They won't, however; reach the level of a fluent human translator for a long time if ever. But for most documents a machine will be able to do a decent job.

        • Says someone who's never translated something. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Valdrax (32670) on Friday September 28 2007, @12:54AM (#20778989)
          Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement.

          Yeah, 'cause researchers have long promised us that AI will reach us in 10 years. <sarcasm>

          Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech? My experience has primarily been with Japanese and English, and I'll tell you right now that it can be nightmarish.

          Sentence fragments are the worst part. Japanese has a completely different word order from English. All modifiers (including phrases and clauses) come before the word they modify, and the language has a Subject-Object-Verb order. "I just saw the man who stole my friend's watch last Tuesday" becomes "Just I Last Tuesday friend's watch stole man saw." Now try translating that from Japanese to English when the sentence is cut in half.

          Worse, the language has very different levels of allowed vagueness. "Complete" sentences in Japanese can contain just a descriptor or an action without any specification of who did/was what. Conversely, translating "3 of them" in English to Japanese is hard because you have to know "3 of what?" to know what counting suffix to use.

          Another problem is that many very different words sound exactly the same when conjugated to the gerund or perfective forms. English has a number of homonyms, but there are MANY more opportunities for mix-ups if you don't have access to kanji to tell the semantic meaning apart because Japanese has a much more limited range of phonemes. For example, take "katte" which is the gerund form of the verbs "kau" (buy), "kau" (keep/raise), "karu" (cut), "karu" (spur on), and "katsu" (win). That's 5 completely different verbs that conjugate to the same sound. If they're written phonetically or your going from speech, then you have to be able to understand the meaning behind the words to translate. (Did I mention earlier that you may not have an explicit subject and object to go off of?)

          Then you get into issues of translating things like politeness levels, different ways of addressing people, and other concepts that don't translate well into English or concepts like singular vs. plural that are dropped in going to Japanese. Let's not even consider puns and poetry!

          These are not trivial issues. An automatic translator would need to somehow be able to conceptualize what a person is trying to speak about, which would require understanding the story being told and an ability to predict where they are going with it. This will require strong AI.

          Accurate and intelligible translation is an art -- not a science -- because it requires an intuitive and empathetic ability to understand the mind of the speaker well enough to map their thoughts into a different method of expression.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by mstahl (701501)

              What the grandparent post is saying is that you might not have a full sentence, nor might a full sentence even provide sufficient information to perform the translation accurately. If Japanese and English were so easy to translate back and forth, don't you think that humans [engrish.com] would have an easier time of it?

              The method of analyzing bilingual pages is great for languages that have a similar structure to one another, like italian and spanish. In fact, this is part of how I learned spanish, by reading a bilingua

              • These guys saying that the technology won't be here within their lifetime have to be ancient or just forgetting how rapidly the pace at which technology accelerates has been increasing of late. How long ago was it that this here "Internet" only had a few hundred nodes?

                I am not exaggerating when I say that automatic translation from extremely dissimilar languages requires strong AI. You need to be able to guess what a person is thinking from what they're expressing to map it into a different way of expressi

  • shouldn't that be (Score:5, Funny)

    by alshithead (981606) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:14PM (#20777995)
    It translates to Engrish?
  • It doesn't seem to be mentioned in TFA, but I have to wonder: Exactly how fast does it copy if it has to translate? I'm sure it's not the near-instantaneous work we've come to expect of our Xeroxes. If the translations aren't just gibberish Engrish, its usefulness will be immense, so the time won't be so much of a concern; but I do still wonder.
  • You have no chance to survive make your time. :)

  • Engrish (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nasarius (593729) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:15PM (#20778017)
    Between the inaccuracy of unproofed OCR and the poor quality of machine translation, I can't imagine that the results are very good.

  • I think of that this is rather sweet. As for converting Japanese rather than easy, converting other manner with a certain manner, with other manner hard. As for existence of Chinese character, for example, thing is made easier. But (with easily from Chinese character. Chinese which becomes complete)

    -:sigma.SB

  • Reminds me of "NewsRadio"... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:23PM (#20778081)
    [Reading from his book, "Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler," translated to Japanese and back again]
    Jimmy: I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo...
    [pauses while turning page]
    Jimmy: dung.

  • Finally! Now I can pour my collection of Hentai into one and enjoy the interesting story lines and character development...

    But I wonder does the english language contain enough exclamations though: Uh!, Ah! ?

  • It's impossible... (Score:5, Informative)

    by wanderingknight (1103573) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:28PM (#20778117)
    ...for a machine, under the current paradigms (that is, no true artificial intelligence) to properly translate something. Translation is not an exact science, and you can't expect to get a decent translation by just having a word-per-word approach. Heck, not even a sentence-per-sentence or paragraph-per-paragraph approach would ever be enough. Translation requires deep social knowledge--you need to know what you are translating, from whom you are translating, for whom you are translating... that is, you need to enclose your translation in a sociological context. No machine can ever wish to do that without artificial intelligence. It's hard enough as it is to get a human being to understand that word-per-word translation is stupid--imagine telling that to your CPU core.

    Disclaimer: I'm a translation student myself ;)

    • Re:It's impossible... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kklein (900361) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:59PM (#20778345)

      Disclaimer: I'm a second language acquisition researcher and assessor.

      I concur. Absolutely. Language is not pure information; it's information shorthand. It assumes a high degree of already-shared knowledge about the world. Some of these assumptions are near-universal; many are not.

      Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.

      This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and, therefore, about the world. Germanic languages seek to operate regardless of context; Asian languages seek to augment (or "comment on") it. If you've ever felt that Japanese people who speak English are beating around the bush or being vague, part of that is cultural, but part of that is the language of the culture that does not require explicitness. A big part of learning Japanese or, for Japanese people, of learning English is learning how to think about the world and about human interactions in a very different way.

      Machines aren't human. They are information processors. They don't know what a "cat" is; they just know that it's a piece of code that can be slotted into a certain place in a set of syntax. Until machines are really intelligent (and I don't think that will be anytime soon), expect more crappy translation than useful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).

  • "Wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. With respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, to send that to the translation engine, and in the place English". You reset, or can grasp
  • If you sit on the glass and photocopy your ass, it just switches to "Enlarge by 50%" mode.

  • It's just going to be a matter of time... (Score:3, Funny)

    by el_flynn (1279) on Thursday September 27 2007, @11:45PM (#20778623)
    ...before we see photos of the scanned documents in http://www.engrish.com/ [engrish.com] ... What were they thinking of??

    • Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Divebus (860563) on Thursday September 27 2007, @10:57PM (#20778337)
      They probably used it to translate the instruction manual into Engrish. [engrish.com]

      • Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)

        by PsamtikNerd (1101713) on Thursday September 27 2007, @11:43PM (#20778603)
        They did something like this with a Japanese car manual a long time ago; it ended up something like: "If a passenger of foot should obstacle your passage, tootle the horn. Tootle him melodiously at first, but if he continues obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor."

              • Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)

                by mikael (484) on Friday September 28 2007, @08:14AM (#20781061)
                That's the fun part of these automatic translators - put in perfectly good English, translate to a foreign language, and translate back to English. Good fun for a rainy afternoon.

                "Today is under construction... please do not be alarmed by the construction men hanging themselves from outside your balcony. We will take them down tomorrow..."

                • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                  by IngramJames (205147)
                  That's the fun part of these automatic translators

                  Actually, this may not be automatic. Japanese and English are (I understand) two languages which differ on fundamental levels. It's not like trying to get to the station and using Franglais: "poor alley a la gar?" It's totally different. Translation is very, very hard, and words are used differently, too. My last job involved working from a spec written in Japanese, and translated by obviously intelligent Japanese people into English. It was... interes

                  • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                    by IngramJames (205147)
                    Actually, an interesting point from what I wrote above: I spent about 2 months (on and off) trying to work out what the Tokyo office wanted. Many emails, and quite a few phone calls were made. Then we sent out a guy to finish off the code (he'd started it in London, based on what we THOUGHT was required). He had my research and English spec (and his preliminary code) as the basis of what was going to be done, but basically, *he* sorted the final stuff out on the spot, in less than a week. It turned out

    • It's the voluntary collaboration with a data tap.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cheros (223479) on Friday September 28 2007, @02:08AM (#20779287)
      What is wild is that anyone with half a working braincell would use a photocopier in an office where a copy of every document is sent to an uncontrolled 3rd party for translation.

      Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..

      (not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).

      So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.

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