TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/072489/07248900.059

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 101 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.