Recent trips have over-extended my language skills. Firstly, a couple of days in Germany had me dredging back almost 15 years for my ‘O’ level phrases.
‘Danke, eine bier bitte’, ‘auf wiedersehen’ and ‘sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ were sufficient until the final airport taxi, when I surpassed myself by recalling ‘flughaven!’
Spain was less successful and I never really progressed beyond ‘Hola’, even though we headed for South America over Christmas, and my wife has borrowed a beginners Spanish course on video.
And then Japan, for which I’d borrowed a couple of audio cassettes and dutifully carried them around in my car for several weeks. ‘Ohayo gozaimasu’, ‘domo’, ‘dozo’ and ‘sumimasen’ at least showed my willingness to learn.
With coaching from the interpreter, I even managed the first three sentences of a workshop talk in Japanese, and was rewarded for my efforts with a round of applause.
But it hardly amounted to fluent conversation with the locals.
With the arrogance of a native English speaker it is, of course, entirely possible to travel the world with barely a passing acknowledgement to the existence of other languages. Indeed, it might be suggested that most Americans manage this feat.
It is taken for granted that business meetings will be conducted in English, e-mails composed in English, and phone calls made and answered in English.
Given our reluctance and/or inability to learn foreign languages, what’s the scope for technology to help us out? Word-by-word translation is readily available – an English-foreign language dictionary, which can be traditional hard copy, electronic or on-line. A recent newsletter from Lonely Planet provided pointers to a range of on-line resources, including a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages and links to multilingual phrasebooks with sound files to aid pronunciation.
In Japan, I saw a pen-sized scanner which could be swept across printed text, and held a vocabulary of 750,000 words for Japanese-English translation. This certainly has value, but not for translations of lengthy prose or fluent speech, for which it is also essential to understand the structure and context of the sentences or even larger linguistic fragments.
An example from my Spanish hotel room will serve to illustrate the point – no doubt accurate at a word-for-word level, but although comprehensible, it has a slight Fawlty Towers ring to it.
“Visits: If you go to your room accompanied with someone else after the 6pm, we will charge you the price of an additional person.”
High-quality machine translation has been a research goal for many years, but it would be only realistic to admit that progress has fallen well short of early expectations. Success is easiest in constrained applications, where specific knowledge of the “domain” can be built into the system.
Example domains include areas of finance and medicine. Systems are only now reaching an acceptable standard for general personalcommunications.
Again, Japan is in the vanguard, with the Internet proving a powerful commercial driver. In a nation where consumers have a seemingly endless appetite for the latest electronic “toys”, Internet take-up has been remarkably slow – similar to the UK, and perhaps 18 months behind the US.
The key reason for this is the lack of Japanese language content, in a global medium dominated by English – albeit with a strong Californian accent.
This is being addressed by a number of commercial products which provide real-time translations of English language Web sites for the Japanese consumer.
I saw the latest developments at the Labs of Toshiba in Tokyo, although my five words of Japanese left me entirely unqualified to judge the current level of performance.
I’ve surfed the Internet a bit and found these handy sitesfor travellers
Lonely Planet
www.lonelyplanet.com
Foreign languages
www.travelang.com/languages
The Ethnologue
www.sil.org./ethnologue.html