The dream of anyone who has struggled with a foreign language during
an international telephone call would be an interpretation system that
automatically translates conversations in different languages. Japanese
scientists described a prototype of just such a system at an international
conference on artificial intelligence in Sydney last week.
Akira Kurematsu, president of the ATR Interpreting Telephone Laboratories,
a private research company in Kyoto, predicts that the real thing will
be up and running early in the next century. L Kurematsu says the ATR’s
prototype translates spoken Japanese into English using a synthesised
English voice. The prototype has a vocabulary of just 400 words which
are associated with a hypothetical scientific conference.
Within two years, Kurematsu says, the translator will ‘speak’ 1500 words,
and within a decade he believes machines will be available to help telephone
users in specific tasks, such as making hotel or conference reservations.
ATR is talking with scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University in the
US and the German company Siemens about developing English-to-Japanese andL
German-to-Japanese translators.
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According to Kurematsu, the ATR translator is composed of three basic
parts. First a speech recognition component breaks the speech into small
linguistic units called phonemes and predicts the next phoneme or word.
Then the machine analyses and translates the information. Finally, a speech
synthesis system produces the voice of the ‘interpreter’. All these steps
are completed by high-speed computers as the user speaks.
