Feature

Multilingual Cyberspace

What do you do if you receive an e-mail message in Chinese or need to read a Web page in German, but English is your only language?

Cyberspace as created by modern computers and telecommunications can handle vast amounts of information at great speed -- but a lot of people can't understand that information. The reason is simple: the world's population speaks many different languages.

One solution to this problem is to have the computers themselves do the translating. Victoria University translation expert Minako O'Hagan believes Machine Translation (MT) can be effective in some areas -- although it wouldn't work on a novel.

O'Hagan, who works in the Department of Asian Languages and also as a freelance translator, is originally from Japan but has lived in New Zealand since 1984. She has published a book, The Coming Industry of Teletranslation.

She sees the economies of the world moving to a single integrated system, linked by high-speed telecommunications networks like the Internet and ISDN. But the technology is running into stubborn language and cultural barriers, she believes, and the demands for fast, accurate translations at a reasonable price are outstripping the ability of the translation industry to supply them.

"Paradoxically, advances in communications technology have tended to highlight the communication gap between different peoples of the world. More choice of communication channels across national and cultural borders mean more cross-cultural encounters take place not only in traditional face-to-face meetings, but via international telephone calls, faxes, e-mail, on-line database access and video conferencing."

In order to keep pace with these developments the translation industry needs to offer language services which meet the emerging demand. Hence the need for "teletranslation", which links skills in language translation world-wide with the latest telecommunications to provide language services "any time" and "anywhere".

In this picture of networked human translators, there is a role to be played by Machine Translation. In the last few decades, MT has proved far more difficult than researchers had originally expected because human language is so complex and subtle, and often depends on both sides in a communication sharing some knowledge that is not stated openly.

However MT has proved useful in some technical fields, where the vocabulary and sentence structure can be quite limited, or in cases where only a rough approximation is needed. As an example of the former, a Canadian weather service has been using an MT system successfully since 1976 to translate its forecasts from English to French. Large organisations such as the EC and NASA are among experienced users of MT systems. In some organisations the sheer volume of the translation work required makes it humanly impossible to translate within the timeframe and budget required.

A new area where MT is growing is in computer network services, where people want to download information that is in a different language from their own. In 1995 CompuServe introduced a unique MT feature in one of its forums where a posting made in English, French, German or Spanish is automatically translated into the three other languages, allowing multilingual communication between members who do not share the same language.

A number of Japanese computer networks also offer a range of such services where "users are aware of the inferior output quality and the fact that this is a clear trade-off against cost and speed". Desktop translation programs are also now coming into wide use and MT is even used by translation companies, who use extra editing by human experts -- both before and after the computer translation -- to achieve the quality required by their clients.

The first MT programs for translating spoken language -- an even more difficult task than text translations -- are coming out of laboratories although O'Hagan says they need much more development before they will be useful.

She states that "the development of teletranslation will not be dependent on the degree of perfection MT may attain" and sees the wider context of the electronic communications environment as the main factor affecting the shape of future teletranslation.

As an example of how developing technology affects the translation industry, she writes that G4 fax standards make it possible to send documents in delicate Asiatic scripts that would have lost clarity in transmission under the G3 standard.

According to O'Hagan, translation services in New Zealand need not be disadvantaged any longer because of their geographical isolation and the small domestic market as long as they are wired to the world.

The translation service has a great affinity with the age of global networks where technology both creates demand for language assistance and offers solutions. While human translators may have to be prepared to lose certain types of work to MT in the near future, O'Hagan says, there will be increased demand for the touch of human expertise to decode hidden messages between the lines.

In her PhD research in the Department of Communication Studies, O'Hagan is looking into scenarios of teletranslation in Virtual Reality environments. In future your virtual meeting may be facilitated by a virtual translator who not only faithfully translates your message but "will adjust the style and format to suit your relationship with the recipient and the nature and context of your message".

Bernard Carpinter is a journalist at Victoria University.