TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072489/07248900.059

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 62

Trying to Decipher Babel


Japanese translating machines make languages less foreign

By Barry Hillenbrand/TOKYO


    The machine clearly does not like poetry. It won't touch
the stuff. Nor is it very fond of novels. Theoretically, it
could cope with some of Hemingway's short, simple sentences,
though it could never make anything of long, convoluted passages
from Faulkner. But give the Toshiba AS-TRANSAC computer a
thoroughly dull, straightforward instruction manual, and it will
earnestly chomp its way through page after page. What it does
with those pages is the amazing part. The Toshiba machine has
linguistic ability far beyond the powers of past generations of
computers: it can translate, at least crudely, one language into
another. In this case, the computer converts simple English into
serviceable, if stilted Japanese.

    The AS-TRANSAC is one of more than half a dozen
machine-translation systems being energetically developed in
Japan. With their strong thirst for information from other
nations and a growing need to disseminate their documents around
the world, the Japanese urgently require computers that can
translate. A few machines, such as the Toshiba model and
Fujitsu's Atlas system, are already in operation, helping
Japanese companies like Mazda translate technical material. A
powerful computer called SHALT, designed by IBM Japan, is being
used extensively for in-house translations. In 1988 SHALT
converted four IBM manuals from English into Japanese. This year
the target is 20 to 30. Predicts Kiyotaka Yasui, manager of the
language and image-technology section at IBM Japan's Tokyo
research laboratory: "In five years the internal-publication
department of IBM Japan will be fulfilling 100% of its
translation requirements via machines."

    But human translators should have no fear that their jobs
are imperiled -- at least for now. None of the new systems are
yet able to take a page of text and render it unerringly into
a different language without the aid of a bilingual editor who
can fine-tune the output for ambiguities in the vocabulary, to
say nothing of shades of meaning. "A truly automatic system is
a dream at the moment," admits Makoto Ihara, manager of
Toshiba's computer product-planning department. Says Kazunori
Muraki, a leading researcher at NEC: "Machine translation is
only to reduce the work involved in human translation."

    And that it does. The present generation of
machine-translation systems, which are priced between $30,000
and $70,000, can nearly double the output of translators of
technical documents. The savings, especially for small firms
unable to maintain a large staff of skilled translators, can be
considerable.

    "Seven or eight years ago," says Koichi Takeda, a
researcher at IBM Japan, "everyone was saying machine
translation was a technology of the future. But now we have it."

    Considering the complexity of the task, the progress in
machine translation has been startling. Essentially, the
translating machine analyzes the syntax of an English sentence,
determining its grammatical structure and identifying, for
example, the subject, verb, objects and modifiers. Then the
words are translated by an English-Japanese dictionary. Next,
another part of the computer program analyzes the resulting
awkward jumble of words and meanings, and generates an
intelligible sentence based on the rules of Japanese syntax and
the machine's understanding of what the original English
sentence meant.

    That is not as simple as it sounds (assuming it sounds
simple at all). Each computer company has devised strikingly
different sets of programs to deal with the fiendish
complexities of the two languages. One step in the IBM system,
for example, refashions the English sentence structure and word
order to resemble Japanese syntax. The result occasionally reads
like the faulty work of a ninth-grade Japanese student of
English. The articles and subjects are gone, and the verb
dangles clumsily at the end. Only after the English sentence has
been transformed into Japanese syntax are the words translated.

    Japan's computer makers are developing machines that can
translate freely among several different languages. Fujitsu,
for example, has a prototype called Atlas 2 that can deal with
Japanese, French, German and English. In the near future,
Spanish, Chinese and Korean will be added. To make such systems
as simple as possible, programmers have invented a coded,
largely numerical language called "interlingual."

    Instead of translating directly from Japanese into German,
the computer would translate from Japanese into interlingual and
then into German. This process cuts down on the number of
dictionaries that programmers have to construct. A
Japanese-interlingual dictionary would be needed, but not a
Japanese-German, Japanese-French or Japanese-Spanish. Explains
Hiroshi Uchida, a researcher at Fujitsu: "If we did not use
interlingual, then each pair of languages would require the
development of a specific set of grammatical rules and a
bilingual dictionary. Interlingual acts as the hub of a wheel."

    The market for such machines will be vast. Says Yasuyo
Kikuta, a researcher in artificial intelligence at Fujitsu:
"Since we Japanese have so much trouble in the area of foreign
languages, machine translation is the kind of tool all Japanese
desire." And since many people in other nations are not
linguistic whizzes either, sales of the electronic translators
should be brisk around the world.