how is it that so many intergalactic species in movies and tv just happen to speak perfect english? the short answer is that no onewants to watch a starship crew spend years compiling an alien dictionary. but to keep things consistent,
crash diet urban dictionary, the creators of star trekand other science-fiction worlds have introduced the conceptof a universal translator, a portable device that can instantlytranslate between any languages. so is a universal translator possible in real life?
we already have many programsthat claim to do just that, taking a word, sentence, or entire book in one language and translating it into almost any other, whether it's modern englishor ancient sanskrit. and if translation were just a matterof looking up words in a dictionary, these programs would run circlesaround humans. the reality, however, is a bit more complicated. a rule-based translation programuses a lexical database, which includes all the words you'd find in a dictionary
and all grammatical forms they can take, and set of rules to recognize the basiclinguistic elements in the input language. for a seemingly simple sentence like,"the children eat the muffins," the program first parses its syntax,or grammatical structure, by identifying the children as the subject, and the rest of the sentence as the predicate consisting of a verb "eat," and a direct object "the muffins." it then needs to recognizeenglish morphology,
or how the language can be broken downinto its smallest meaningful units, such as the word muffin and the suffix "s," used to indicate plural. finally, it needs to understand the semantics, what the different parts of the sentenceactually mean. to translate this sentence properly, the program would refer to a different setof vocabulary and rules for each element of the target language. but this is where it gets tricky.
the syntax of some languagesallows words to be arranged in any order, while in others, doing so could makethe muffin eat the child. morphology can also pose a problem. slovene distinguishes betweentwo children and three or more using a dual suffix absent in many other languages, while russian's lack of definite articlesmight leave you wondering whether the children are eating some particular muffins, or just eat muffins in general. finally, even when the semanticsare technically correct,
the program might miss their finer points, such as whether the children "mangiano" the muffins, or "divorano" them. another method is statistical machine translation, which analyzes a database of books, articles, and documents that have already been translated by humans. by finding matches between sourceand translated text that are unlikely to occur by chance, the program can identify correspondingphrases and patterns,
and use them for future translations. however, the quality of this type of translation depends on the size of the initial database and the availability of samples for certain languages or styles of writing. the difficulty that computers havewith the exceptions, irregularities and shades of meaningthat seem to come instinctively to humans has led some researchers to believethat our understanding of language is a unique product of our biological brain structure.
in fact, one of the most famousfictional universal translators, the babel fish from "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy", is not a machine at allbut a small creature that translates the brain wavesand nerve signals of sentient species through a form of telepathy. for now, learning a languagethe old fashioned way will still give you better results thanany currently available computer program. but this is no easy task, and the sheer number of languages in the world,
as well as the increasing interactionbetween the people who speak them, will only continue to spur greateradvances in automatic translation. perhaps by the time we encounterintergalactic life forms, we'll be able to communicate with themthrough a tiny gizmo, or we might have to start compilingthat dictionary, after all.
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