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Handhelds Hardware

Spoken Japanese-English translation Using Your PDA 127

Posted by Hemos from the better-be-a-fast-microprocc dept.
Ewann writes "Yet another step closer to the universal translator: Digitimes is reporting that NEC has announced trials of software for your PDA that listens to spoken English and Japanese phrases, translates them, and re-speaks them in the other language. Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo."
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Spoken Japanese-English translation Using Your PDA More

Spoken Japanese-English translation Using Your PDA

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  • The Correct Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by pgrote ( 68235 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @06:42PM (#3624210) Homepage
    The Correct Link [digitimes.com]

    Sig: CompuNotes Rocks [compunotes.com] what else should I say?
  • I can't wait until we can get one of these that can speak spanish, mandarin, etc. I live in LA, and people speak at least a dozen languages at me every day.
    • Just make sure you know how to say "Where can I buy new batteries?", in every language you hope your PDA to translate.

      I would personally prefer a speak in, write out translator - I'd be more likely to pick up the basics of which every language I was emerged in, rather than completely relying on the PDA .

      I don't imagine it would take much to add that feature, if it's not already there.

  • AYB (Score:5, Funny)

    by cpeikert ( 9457 ) <cpeikert@alum.mit.WELTYedu minus author> on Saturday June 01, 2002 @06:44PM (#3624215) Homepage
    How does it translate: "All your base are belong to us"?
  • looks like the poster made a mistake here is the link to the actual article
    link [digitimes.com]
  • I think that could be very useful. Of course, it won't compare with this. [slashdot.org]
    Can't wait until this stuff is declassified.

  • Nice idea... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by oldave ( 160729 )
    the article's short on detail, though. Which PDAs can handle this? It seems a processor intensive task, so I'm guessing there would be some pretty significant delay - it's hard to imagine it being realtime.
  • To quote Monty Python [montypython.net]:
    I quote on example. The Hungarian phrase meaning "Can you direct me to the station?" is translated by the English phrase, "Please fondle my bum."

  • We Need This... (Score:5, Funny)

    by IronTek ( 153138 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @06:48PM (#3624236)
    If you're asking yourself, "why do we really need this," or if you're just a caucasian who likes anime and is just browsing Slashdot, here is why we need this [umass.edu]!
    • Hopefully everyone read to the end and took it as a joke...it's really not THAT bad...after all, if you speak English you have all the sounds you need to speak Japanese...
      • Not exactly - the r/l (usually denoted ra, ri, ru, re, ro) syllables don't really correspond directly with an english sound. However, us stupid Americans can just use an "r" sound. :)

  • thank god! (Score:3, Funny)

    by zenintrude ( 462825 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @06:50PM (#3624238)
    now i can freak out japanese schoolgirls in perfect understanding of my intentions.
    • You've obviously never been to Japan. That should read, "Now I can make Japanese schoolgirls shudder with delight when I tell them my intentions!"

      Man, they love us. Tokyo was good to me :)

  • Useful in Tokyo? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lethyos ( 408045 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @06:50PM (#3624239) Journal
    Which district? There are significantly different dialects of Nihon'go spread throughout Tokyo itself, let alone the northern and southern parts of the country. Try learning some basic Japanese before journeying to Japan. You PDA will likely end up calling a 30+year lady an "oban-san" and that's the last thing you want in Japan. :)

    • Re:Useful in Tokyo? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, it won't! There is such a thing as "standard Japanese" very well defined in Japan. So, these devices will translate into standard Japanese.
      Even in rural area in Japan, you will never see a Japanese who cannot understand standard Japanese, while they may never speak that to you. Within Tokyo (I am talking about Tokyo only, not including the surrounding area), the spread of the dialect is very limited. In fact, in southern Kanto area (Kanto is near-Tokyo area in Japan), standard Japanese is spoken by most people.
      It is true that some Japanese dialects are hard to understand if you aren't used to, but it doesn't mean people can't communicate each other in the last 40 years thanks to the mass media (radio and TV).
      One last thing, there is not such an expression as "oban-san" in Japanese, at least it is not a usual expression. I assume you mean "obaa-san"?? "Obaa-san" means an old lady (60+ years old), and "oba-san" means an older lady (30-50 years old, maybe). There is such a word as "oban", which means the same as "oba-san", but also contains somewhat negative sense there (and not very polite in many cases). In the literal sense, "obaa-san" means grandmother, and "oba-san" means aunt, by the way.

    • IMHO, that would be better than calling her an "ofukuro", for what it's worth.

    • If it really did work well, I'm sure it would be useful in any part of Tokyo. Despite the fact that there are "significantly differently dialects" in the city, I'm sure it could get the message across much better than by trying to do some sort of Japenglish with a lot of big hand motions. This is, of course, assuming that it worked well (a big assumption). The Japanese have no trouble understanding each other, and I'm sure they happen to meet people from other districts all the time, and somtimes they might even try to talk to them.
    • The different dialects spoken it Tokyo are hardly even noticeable. Even understanding the dialects from all over Japan isn't that big of a deal.

      As for using oban, obasan, and obaasan for a 30 year old woman, I would recommend against all of them. Most 30 year old Japanese women prefer the term oneesan. If you call them one of the other three, they will take offense (in spite of the fact that the use of obasan would be technically correct).
      • No. At 30, they've usually come to accept and expect "obasan". Calling them "oneesan" will make you look like trying to kiss up. Women stop being "oneesan" when they marry, which is around 25 on average.
  • it seems really cool, and the article is a little light on details, however they say it covers words and phrases that would be good for travellers. I imagine that this uses the same type of thing that phone systems do, like "press or say 1 to talk to sales" that sort of thing. more audio pattern recognition. I can't wait until it can be used for more stuff such as business meetings, casual conversations and stuff...
  • I've tried many new technologies in my sort life. Based on my expirences, here's how this will work:

    Step 1: I go to Japan
    Step 2: I go to a store
    Step 3: I tell my PDA "How much is a new Pentium 5"? (they'll be out by the time I can afford to go to Japan ;) )
    Step 4: The PDA thinks for 20 minutes
    Step 5: It says something in Japanese
    Step 6: I end up infront of a firing squad
    Step 7: I tell my PDA "Please don't shoot, this is just a missunderstanding!"
    Step 8: The PDA thinks another 20 minutes
    Step 9: They shoot me now as opposed to at sunrise tomarrow

    Seriously though, this will be need if it works, but I doubt that the PDAs will be powerfull enough to do it with any reasonable speed. Desktop's maybe...

    • "Seriously though, this will be need if it works"

      Your translator broken?
    • There's a good possibility that's true. But if the PDA is in a network, suddenly the processing power bottleneck MIGHT be somewhere else...

      It all depends on whether the PDA has the power and the bandwidth to send whatever you say in some format to the NEC server, which could have some big iron running these things by the thousands per second.
    • From everything I've heard most people don't have a hard time in Japan. Basically there are tons of high school and college kids who want to practice their English on you. At times it's like they won't even leave you alone.

      I had a tutor from Japan with some sort of hand held gizmo that did translations. Her English was terrible, my Japanese was/is terrible - so you can imagine how pathetic the conversations were. She would try to say something, drag out the translater, punch a few keys, make a puzzled face, then put it away. I always wondered if it actually helped at all.

    • Sig (Score:1)

      by Zach978 ( 98911 )
      haha, funny sig. Reminds me of this [penny-arcade.com] Penny Arcade.
    • but I doubt that the PDAs will be powerfull enough to do it with any reasonable speed.

      compared to looking it up in a berlitz dictionary? or making hand signals? at least it will be more convenient (if it works...) and the speed will improve

  • Make sure you use headphones (Score:4, Funny)

    by Brento ( 26177 ) <brento.brentozar@com> on Saturday June 01, 2002 @06:57PM (#3624260) Homepage
    Stealth is the real advantage. Use a single earbud headphone, and make it look like it's coming out of your cellphone. Then you'll be able to eavesdrop in on the restaurant waiters while they laugh at your bad pronounciation, and find out if the chicks dig your American vibe.

    I wonder if the translations sound as stilted as Babelfish - I don't know that I'd be able to keep a straight face while I used this thing.
  • when it speaks back to you,it'll probably be in a robotic monotonic voice

    if you replicate that (which you will if you have no experience with the language) nobody will be able to understand you

    go ahead. try it on your friends. in english.
  • Get into the really cool strip clubs in Tokyo? Nothing has been able to get me in yet!

  • Automatic translation... Ha, Ha, Ha... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zero Sum ( 209324 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @07:28PM (#3624350)
    I once worked next door to the translation department for a major japanese computer house. The translators used to use me as a technical resource. One particular time, a translator looked at the japanese and translated the words as "fingering the ulimate nothingness that underlies everything". This was from part of some C programming instructions. Took me nearly eight hours to figure out that the phrase was "pointer to void". Automatic translation will be a joke for a long time to come.
    • One particular time, a translator looked at the japanese and translated the words as "fingering the ulimate nothingness that underlies everything". This was from part of some C programming instructions. Took me nearly eight hours to figure out that the phrase was "pointer to void"

      Okay, now hand the same phrase to Joe Translator, who doesn't speak C. I seriously doubt that you'll get anything better. The problem was not that you were using an automatic translator; it was that you were using a translator, human or otherwise, that didn't know the jargon of the field you were translating.

      • Okay, now hand the same phrase to Joe Translator, who doesn't speak C. I seriously doubt that you'll get anything better. The problem was not that you were using an automatic translator; it was that you were using a translator, human or otherwise, that didn't know the jargon of the field you were translating.

        Glad you got the point. ie. Automatic translation will be a joke for a long time to come, precisely because a machine cannot automatically understand the context and much of language is context. If you read the post, you would have seen that it wasn't an automatic translator, in fact it wasn't 'Joe Translator" but 'Scott Translator' who specialised in translating technical material. They only came to me when they were really 'puzzled'.

      • Actually, machine translation works best with technical documents. Granted, it's not as easy as feed it a document in one language, and it spits out the finished translation...

        However, you can create document specific glossaries for things like jargon or commonly used phrases in the document. A good glossary file will give you a document that's roughly 60-80% translated. The only thing left is for a technical translator who speaks the target language natively to check the document for readability and any bizzare translation that didn't get caught by the glossary.

        Again, it takes both a good glossary and a native technical translator to get a good translation. Otherwise, the results can be less than spectacular...

        I once did a bit of translation of a document which was for a interface spec. At one point, the document must been translated into Japanese by someone who was non-technical, because at one point the spec literally said the product could accept up to 50 "twisted pear" connections.
    • Ectaco [ectaco.com] makes similar products, but as they are based in St. Petersburg, Russia, I don't think they have Unicode pages for the East Pacific Rim ready.

      Best wishes,
      James

  • I can just imagine... [2] (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >"Should be very handy the next time I'm in Tokyo."

    I can just imagine:

    You: "Pardon me Ms. Schoolgirl, where can I buy some seafood?"
    PDA: "I shall violate you with my massive tentacles!"

    (note: previosu post was an error; I had put the quotes in 's . doh!)

  • For those of you who don't read Japanese... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ilbrec ( 170056 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @07:46PM (#3624401)
    For those of you who don't read Japanese, I give you a bit more info on this. Based upon what I read here [yahoo.co.jp] (Yahoo News Japan), it is a Pocket PC 2002 (which is no surprise, as NEC makes one of these in Japan). They are also hoping to make versions for other languages as well. What's written there seems the original Japanese of the post in Digitimes. And here [nec.co.jp] is the press release from NEC.
    Based upon what it says on NEC's press release, it works via voice recognition, not via phone as somebody suggested. It is tuned to understand standard American English (whatever that means) and standard Japanese (which is well defined). The recognition is based upon common words used for tourists, so if you try to translate technical terms, it probably wont' understand you at all. Just like many voice recognition, the way how you speak will determine the accuracy of voice recognition (with a thick accent, you won't go anywhere).
    They will have special booth set up for this for evaluation of the technology in Narita Airport in late June.
    It probably works via voice recognition and translation engine. Voice recognition is something that has been being developed everywhere as you know. English-Japanese translation engine is something that Japanese has been working on for a number of years, as Japanese is very different from any other language, and pretty much useless outside of Japan, as nobody else speaks Japanese.
    Based upon my experience with these translation engines I have seen in Japan, they work very poorly. You will get most ideas across, but the sentences are very unnatural at best, often incomprehensive. Of course, these are often a lot better than English written by most Japanese. I personally think it is nearly impossible to make really good English-Japanese bi-directional translation engine, as Japanese grammers are so erratic and loose.
    Of course, these devices/softwares probably are better than nothing if you know absolutely nothing about the language...
    • >Just like many voice recognition, the way how you >speak will determine the accuracy of voice >recognition (with a thick accent, you won't go >anywhere).
      Not only accent, background noise can usually kill these tidy little programs. I went to a trade show in Hong Kong couple of years ago. A reputable telco company was selling their interactive phone menu system. Basically, it recognises the language you are speaking and then replaces the touch-tone options by voice. The vocabulary is pretty limited, of course... (Just numbers, alphabets and simple options eg "which language are you using, English or Cantonese?" )

      It failed horribly. That guy who showed me the product was so embarrassed that he asked all his colleagues to shut up. Suddenly, everything works 100% fine...
    • Of course, these are often a lot better than English written by most Japanese
      English written (or spoken) by most Japanese is, well.. it isn't. I found that there are very few Japanese who have even basic mastery of the English language, and most travellers (like myself) to Japan do not know any Japanese. If you think that these translation engines "will get most ideas across" as you put it, they will be a huge boon to foreigners in Japan, or Japanese travelling abroad.
  • Sweet! I can use it to translate my anime (no self-respecting nerd [livejournal.com] would even consider watching the dub!) and Japanese pop music [ponycanyon.co.jp]!

    Assuming it translates smarter than Babelfish and some of the crazy entries at Animelyrics [animelyrics.com], this would be an excellent device indeedy. Do you suppose it would outputs only in Romajii, though? What about katakana [kids-japan.com], hiragana [kids-japan.com] and kanji [notredame.ac.jp]? Nevermind, authenticity isn't anywhere near as important as Pocky [pyoko.org], DiGi Charat [pyoko.org] and Hapatai [ponycanyon.co.jp].

    Yatta, yatta... [verylowsodium.com]
  • I hope this isn't the same interpreter they used for Zero Wing...

    "All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!"
  • What if your PDA doesn't have a built-in audio hardware support?
  • like an origami boulder [origamiboulder.com]

    And it might be good for picking up on the hot chic with the Stephen Hawking fetish in Japanese class...
  • We could hook this up to an anime title and have a fan dub. I mean, nevermind all the voices would be changed into one computer one, and 50% of the story would be lost, and...oh...blast..
  • Does this mean that we can figure out what the following phrases actually mean(?): a.Someone set up us the bomb, b.Main Screen turn on, c.All your base are belong to us.

    I guess that would require a Japanese->English->Japanese translator.

    -Sean
  • They already have electronic gadgets that allow Japanese to choose a phrase from the menu, push the button, and it speaks the English phrase out loud. This won't be much better. Most Japanese construct their sentences without subjects and often without objects. Actual rules of grammar are ignored when not necessary to get the meaning across. The listener is already familiar with what/who they are talking about and can make sense of it: the computer will have no chance.

    People should stop being lazy. If you want to speak a foreign langauge, just learn the damn language. It's not that hard to do when you really need to (even Japanese).

  • Most people have the ability to learn at least SOME of another language if they want to. Depending on your workplace, learning another language might be a powerful career move, too. I'm not going to trust some gadget to speak for me in a language I don't understand! What if your PDA got hacked? Hahaha.

    Language is a product for person to person communication, and human communication is all about context, facial expressions, body language, and it is going to be a long long time before we get a babelfish. There won't be puffs of logic anytime soon! Hehe.

    Just take a night class. They should teach more languages in public schools, or let students pick..
  • Finally, I can watch the Zed team without going to dbzoa.net!
  • Why am I somehow reminded of a sketch by Monty Python called the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook [montypython.net]. I'd just love to see someone hack a translator, just so we can see lots of Japanese people going around saying:
    • Did I say you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? I am no longer infected.
    • Drop your panties Sir William, I cannot wait until lunchtime.
    • My nipples explode with delight!

  • Engrish (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by LadyLucky ( 546115 )
    engrish.com [engrish.com]

    'nuff said.

  • I think the real test would be to hook one up to your AV system, pop in an import LD, and see if it can handle dialogue like:
    "Officer! That adorable moppet has stolen my VF-11 moditransformable Aerotech fighter!"
  • Voice recognition technology cannot identify MY voice and put down the English text for it, how the hell it is supposed to translate it into another language?

    The minimal success rate even after hours of training

    training program: "Say 'The Cat Jumped Fast.' "

    Me: "The cat jumped fast"

    Comp: "Error, please say the sentence 'The cat jumped fast.' "

    Me: "The cat jumped fast"

    Repeat 3-4x

    Comp: "Error, you are not saying the phrases as directed on screen, please try again at a later time."

    Fuck it. If I say "The cat jumped fast." I know what I said, and the damn computer had better adjust to ME.

  • Japan has been trying to come up with tools to do this for a long time. My father in law has a program that attempts to do it (and fails miserably), which runs on CPM.

    From my experience learning and speaking Japanese, I think Japanese is a very tight language. Grammar rules have very few exceptions. If you were using translation software to translate between Japanese and another equally strict language, I could fathom it working at some point.

    On the other hand, I don't think that Japanese/English translation software can ever work beyond providing just a gist of what is being said or written. English is too radical. Grammar rules are broken almost as often as not and English spelling is goofy to say the least. I think it would be nice if someone could pull it off though.

    • My thoughts exactly. I have heard several opinions that state that Japanese is better suited for machine translations than most western languages.

      And, also, some linguists think that English is definitely not the best language to start thinking of building universal language processors, for the specific reasons you listed. Grammar is not the most easiest to understand (I've been using the language for way over a decade and I still dont' get how some of the prepositions work...) and - ewww, take that ortography back where it came from, please, I'd rather not discuss it while I'm eating.

      You build a tool to process a boring language and get a neat end result; you start building an "universal" tool, starting from English and end up creating a monster. This is not intended as a flame, but I'd say that English is not the best language for any job - but it gets used because often it does the job somehow while others may not even get started. Consistent with Internet philosophies, no wonder it's number 1 =)

      ...

      For example, GNU Ispell was originally developed for English, and as a result, there was a little bit of problems when they tried to make it work with Finnish. Unlike English, Finnish is a synthetic language where most grammar forms are formed with suffixes. (The now-traditional haiku example of seven syllables, "juoksentelisinkohan", would mean "I wonder if I should run" - perfect word for describing the stressful life =)

      The end result of early Ispell experiments was that the program did take a list of Finnish words, and list of Finnish suffixes, but *any* combination of these was recognized as a valid word, and some completely valid words made using these were rejected!

      The experts then said that the best language to start building the spellchecker for might be some Inuit language, forgot which... They wandered to the back room muttering something about agglutination =)

      • I have heard several opinions that state that Japanese is better suited for
        machine translations than most western languages.


        WRITTEN Japanese, yes. The kanji characters, which make the language hard to learn, are a great boon for machine translation because they have a (more or less) fixed meaning.

        • Yes, written. =)

          (I'm constantly reminded of the experiment in Finnish: a robot did understand "general" Finnish, but blew its fuses when confronted with Savo dialect... "Päevee. Päevee?" *BOOM* (this movie reference is probably extremely obscure to foreigners and probably somewhat obscure to younger people in Finland, too =) )

  • after all, if I were making something like this, I'd be reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal tempted to have it translate "How do I find the nearest bathroom?" to "I have three testicles!" or "I think you're cute, wanna go to my place?" to "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverine."

    Maybe it's just me, I dunno.
  • does it speak like yoda?
  • Really I think before machine translation is a workable reality, we'll need something like Cyc. To get a real, decent translation simple rule based systems aren't sufficient - you need to be able to translate the languages into logical formulae that can then be reconstructed into the new language. Cyc already has this ability to a limited extent (though only for english), but really, I think this is the way to go.
  • There's quite a few job posings for bilingual Japanese/English electrical engineers. I was going to take elementry Japanese with the hope of getting on of these jobs... I wonder if this device can be used to help pass me off, sort of an electronic crutch. It's no substitute for the real thing, I know, but I wonder if companies are willing to implememt technology if it achieves the same result. Bottom line, I'm off to the Community College...

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