29.3479, Universally Translating in Space

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3479. Tue Sep 11 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3479, Universally Translating in Space

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Editor for this issue: Nils Hjortnaes <nils at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 11:22:14
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Universally Translating in Space

 
"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like - and probably the oddest thing
in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious
frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the
conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of
the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear,
you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the
speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix."

In other words, the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
translates the subconscious of the speaker into language the listener
understands. It’s just one example of a universal translator in science
fiction, where they’re often used by writers to get around the languages and
dialect part of world building, but it’s personally one of my favorites.
Unlike a mysterious box, device, or computer program, such as those used in
Star Trek or Men in Black, which translates from speech to speech, the Babel
fish doesn’t try to be realistic by today’s standards and thereby avoids many
of the problems that make real time translators so difficult, if not
impossible.

It didn’t take long after computers came into existence that researchers began
trying to use them for machine translation (MT). “This will be easy!”, they
thought, conceptualizing simple word to word translation systems, and not
realizing the maze of a problem they were getting themselves into. We have
made a lot of progress in the decades since then, and some machine
translators, such as Google’s, can produce some passable translations between
certain languages. (To the students reading this, they still won’t trick your
language teacher, so don’t try.) Even so, there is a long way to go between
where we are and universal translators, especially real time ones. Besides the
typical major problems in MT such as idioms, word order, sparsity of data, and
dealing with morphology in general, real time translators will have to process
information they don’t have yet. Differences in sentence structure and word
order between languages mean that a delay in speech to speech translation is
inevitable, which makes realistic translators in movies/tv feel a bit too
clunky.

This is why I’m such a fan of the Babel fish, and the Tardis’ translation
matrix from Doctor Who for that matter, which also uses a type of telepathic
field. They get around a lot of the issues we run into in MT simply by taking
advantage of worldbuilding. Does it take some suspension of disbelief to
accept a telepathic fish you stick in your ear which excretes translated
speech? Sure, but it fits right in with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s
universe and style, and instead of being just close enough to the truth to be
irritating, it’s just crazy enough to think, hey, that just might work!

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