Google Flashes Star Trek Gizmo
February 8, 2010
Short honk: In 2006 one of my partners and I made a series of presentations to Big Telecommunications Companies. After about 15 minutes of introductory comments, I perceived the reaction as my bringing a couple of dead squirrels into the conference room, chopping them up, and building a fire with the telco executives’ billfolds. Chilly and hostile are positive ways to describe the reaction to my description of Google’s telecommunications related technologies. Fortunately I got paid, sort of like a losing gladiator getting buried in 24 BCE in a mass grave.
You can see telco woe when you read and think about the story in the Herald Sun, “Google Leaps Barrier with Translator Phone.” The story apparently surfaced in the paywall secure London Times but the info leaked into the world in which I live via Australia. The key point in the write up was the sentence:
If it [a Google phone with automatic translation] worked, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.
Well, if it worked, it means that the Googlers’ voice search, machine translation, and low latency distributed computing infrastructure will find quite a few new customers in my opinion. Think beyond talking, which is obviously really important. I wonder if entertainment executives can see what the telco executives insisted was impossible tin 2006.
One president of a big cellular company in the chilly Midwest said in a very hostile tone as I recall, “Google can’t do telecommunications. It’s an ad company. We’re a telecommunications company. There’s a difference.”
Oh, is there? Bits are bits in my experience. I used to watch Star Trek and so did some Googlers assert I.
Stephen E Arnold, February 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I will report non payment to the FCC, a really great entity.
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5 Responses to “Google Flashes Star Trek Gizmo”
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I wish Google well but, as a linguist, I’m not convinced that they are aware of the enormity of the task that faces them.
I advocate a non-technological solution, i.e. wider use of the planned international language Esperanto. At least we know it works.
Bill Chapman,
Google enjoys big challenges. Thanks for posting. Keep ’em coming.
Stephen E Arnold, February 8, 2010
Esperanto: this is satirical – is it?
Over the last 25 years I’ve seen a couple of campaigns to promote Esperanto. None gained much traction.
Reason: People ask themselves: How many people can my kids talk to when I teach them English as a foreign language? Compare that to Esperanto.
For native speakers, substitute English with, let’s say, Spanish or Chinese.
Although I admit that Google’s solution might be suboptimal (linguistically), I don’t see how billions of people will be lifted over the barrier of learning Esperanto.
Perhaps, Spanglish is the new Esperanto!
Google’s “Babel Fish” translator will in never solve the language problem. Not only does it discriminate against anyone who cannot afford a mobile phone, but against minority language groups as well.
There are 6,800 languages worldwide, not fifty-two !
Moreover, if I met a native in Borneo, and he said to me in Hakka “I’ve lost my mobile phone” how would I understand him 🙂 And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !
As English loses its economic power, the answer is not for us to move to Mandarin Chinese, but to Esperanto which puts all speakers on an equal footing.
Have a look at http://www.lernu.net or http://www.esperanto.net
@Martin Baumgartel — umm…are you at all literate? (Note: Literate doesn’t mean knowing how to interpret symbols on a page to reconstruct the equivalent speech; it also implies the ability to think rationally about the words you see, and to comprehend their meaning.) I’m thinking not, because it’s clear you did not comprehend a single word written anywhere on this page.
How does, to analogize if I may, “a language we know from experience that enables two parties to talk and fully understand each other despite not having a common ethnic language” and “a language that only a few hundred thousand speak world-wide” even come close to relating to each other? The Esperanto solution to this problem has been demonstrated practically throughout history since its first publication in 1887. That others don’t agree to adopt its use IS NOT a reflection of Esperanto’s ineptitude towards solving this problem, but instead speaks to the ignorance, and I dare say even _fear_, of those who deny its utility.
Numerous technologies (yes, language is a technology) have existed without problems to solve for years. Consider the most well-known — the laser. Esperanto might be a solution in search of a problem, but we’re increasingly finding ourselves encountering problems awfully close to what Zamenhof tried to solve.
Consider if there are 6000 spoken languages on the planet. To translate any one of them to any other, you’ll need 36 *MILLION* translation knowledge-bases, to adequately cover idiomatic expressions and the like. Or, you can write 6001. As a business owner, looking at this purely from a programming resource management and cost analysis problem, the answer is self-evident. I will spend three orders of magnitude less funds on using Esperanto as the common inter-language representation.
See how this works? YOU don’t need to know it’s Esperanto under the hood. YOU only see English and, well, pick whatever else you want to deal with. The COMPUTER, however, maintains its common language understanding in terms of Esperanto.
So, to answer the question I posed above, it doesn’t. Your argument is *COMPLETELY* predicated on a fallacy big enough to drive a _planet_ through.