Language translation barriers can prevent us from communicating with one another. But what if these barriers didn’t exist? What if they could be overcome completely within the next ten years?

Jonathan Lichtman is a senior vice president at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He believes that technology is the key to overcoming the language translation barrier. His firm recently launched the first translator that integrates both machine translation and automated speech recognition into the same platform.

Jeff Barrett is co-founder of Status Creative. He spoke to Lichtman about why the possibilities of this technology are exciting and what lies ahead for the sector.

This is part one of a two-part post. Part two follows.

1. Why is language translation technology important?

Rapid globalization has created a growing demand for language translation services. Common Sense Advisory estimates demand for these services will grow 12% annually and human translators do not have the capacity to meet this demand.

2. So how exactly does language translation technology help meet this growing demand?

Language translation technology enables translation at a level where it does not need to involve a human and it increases human translator productivity by up to 400%.

3. Part of this technology involves developing a new language pair. How long does it take to develop a new language pair, and what are the main barriers to automating the translation?

A language pair will only be developed if it’s commercially viable and the market dictates which pairs get developed first. In the U.S., Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Asian languages are the most in demand.

While times may vary, it can take up to a month to develop a new language pair. Our hybrid machine translation technology is unique because we can develop a new language with much less data than either statistical (SMT) or rules-based (RBMT) engines alone.

This important leap in language translation technology addresses two main barriers to the automation and accuracy of a language pair: not having enough translated data available and the constant evolving nature of language.

4. With this new approach, at what point can we completely overcome the language translation barrier?

Human language is complex. If I am with a colleague and we are both native English speakers, I still may only understand 98% of his intended meaning. So for that reason alone, language translation technology will never be perfect. The rapidly evolving nature of language I mentioned earlier is another.

There are language translation solutions that can now approximate the accuracy of humans in some cases. In the next decade the quality of language technology will evolve to where human-quality machine translations will be the norm rather than the exception. But human communication will never be without misunderstanding and inaccurate perceptions regardless of how well the technology performs.

5. As we move closer to better language translation capabilities, what kind of impact will this have on cultures around the world?

This technology will have a considerable impact on culture. Language and culture are inseparable and language plays a huge role in the transmission of different cultures across the globe.

There are significant benefits from the diffusion of culture through the use of this technology. Different cultural perspectives will become available across a much larger audience…leading to better understanding of perspectives. Cultural diffusion will also become more accessible regardless of socioeconomic conditions that may have prevented this in the past.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation Inc.

See Also

• More about language translation
  Language translation helps us to communicate with one another
• More about machine translation
  Raw machine translation may only be sufficient for communicating via social networks, or getting the gist of a foreign language website.
• Why Technology Is Key to Overcoming the Language Barrier
  Language barriers prevent us from completely connecting. But what if the language barrier didn?t exist? What if we could completely overcome it in the next ten years?
• More about SAIC
  Founded by J. Robert Beyster, Ph.D., and a small group of scientists in 1969, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a FORTUNE 500® company, and its subsidiaries now have approximately 40,000 employees worldwide.