It doesn’t quite look like the Universal Translator that Star Trek promised, but a new set of earbuds may prove more than ever that the future is now.
Look, we all want a jetpack and a hoverboard and a suit of titanium alloy armor, but being able to instantly communicate with people across the world as though language barriers don’t exist is really the more impressive of any of these feats. And it turns out, Google has just the thing.
Snuck into a recent Google presentation was the reveal of Google Pixel Buds, a set of earbuds that are designed to work with the new Pixel 2 handset. But while they have all the usual bells and whistles you expect of an earbud set (as well as a few extras), they added a brand new feature that tech groups and conglomerates have been trying to set up for years now—instant translation. Now, if you are wearing the buds, all you have to do is ask it to “Help me speak [insert language]” and your spoken words will be translated in realtime, then reissued by your phone’s speakers to the person you’re trying to chat with.
But that’s not a full translation, you say. You’re quite right. Which is why when your conversation partner replies to you, the words will be translated back into your language via the earbuds. With virtually zero lag time. Obviously it will all be a bit different out in the world with networks and patchy service, but this changes the game entirely in terms of global communication. Pixel Buds have access to 40 languages as well, putting them well ahead of the game next to other translating devices and apps.
I’m being very chill about this, which is ridiculous because the point is that the universal translator was finally invented and that means we must be really close to the Federation by now and where is Hoshi Sato, she is obviously responsible for this.
Get ready. We are gonna make so many new friends!
[Via Engadget]
Babelfish. It’s quite clearly an artificial babelfish (which is the comparison the British press are making, on the probably valid assumption that most of us know what that is).
The translation ability of Pixel Buds DOES sound very cool, but it’s certainly not a universal translator, since the UT can translate brand-new languages. Heck, in “Metamorphosis,” the Universal Translator translates the Companion’s THOUGHTS into English!
So this new development is very cool and very useful, but if we meet actual aliens, Pixel Buds won’t be able to translate their speech, because it won’t have a database for them. We’ll have to get Hoshi and Uhura on the job to assemble that database before the rest of us can speak to them … at least until a real UT is invented. :-)
@2/Corylea: You’re right. People forget that the reason it’s called a Universal Translator is because it can translate anything. A translator that can only handle languages it already knows is, by definition, not universal.
(Although if they have a device that can translate the thoughts of a floaty sparkly alien gas cloud, how come Captain Pike can only communicate in beeps???????????)
@@@@@Muswell: Came here to post this exact comment.
@3/ChristopherLBennett — Maybe because “The Menagerie” was Season 1, and “Metamorphosis” was Season 2, so the UT was invented/upgraded/expanded in the interim?
It’s also true that in “Metamorphosis,” Spock had to work on the UT for awhile in order to broaden it enough to understand a gas cloud. Maybe he could have done it for Pike, too, but didn’t want to, because then everyone would have been able to understand that Pike was saying, “Don’t let Spock throw his life away by taking me to Talos IV!” :-)
Or maybe it’s because Star Trek’s technology usually has whatever capabilities and limitations the current plot requires, especially during the TOS era, when they were making EVERYTHING up at a breakneck pace. ;-) The miracle of TOS is always how good it was, given the limitations — of time, money, and technology — under which it was made.
Hrm, let’s not be hasty. Instantly knowing exactly what the other person just said isn’t always considered a Good Thing. Recall that many held the poor Babelfish responsible for starting some of the bloodiest, most destructive wars in history… ;-)
@6/Ian: “Instantly knowing exactly what the other person just said isn’t always considered a Good Thing.”
Well, it uses Google Translate, so I don’t think “exactly” is likely to be an issue.
Or, as that sentence turned out when I Google-translated it to Japanese and back, “Well, as we are using Google Translate, we do not believe that ‘precisely’ will be a problem.“
I hope this becomes popular. I’ve always wanted an excuse to quote General Chang/Adlai Stevenson. “Don’t wait for the translation! Answer me now!”
@CLB: Ah, right! So, single devices to handle discussions among international/interstellar friends, but chains of devices (each set to a different language) to insert some diplomacy between hostile parties. The game of telephone might never be the same!
As cool as this can be, I feel this is also the time to share this song translated by Google.
https://youtu.be/2bVAoVlFYf0
Languages are hard to directly quickly.
As they say these days, shut up and take my money. Multiligual ability would be sooo useful.
@10: At least that one somewhat conveys the song’s original meaning. The supremely hilarious Google Translate Sings for “I’ll Make a Man out of You”, by contast… https://youtu.be/mRLreV7uVy0
Granted, this one was a group compilation instead of one translation-set sequence by one person. But it’s too good not to share.
Instantaneous translation – even for German?
There’s the old story of the American woman visiting Berlin and she went to the Reichstag to hear Bismarck speak. Her translator is keeping up until one point when he goes silent, even though the Iron Chancellor is still speaking. The woman starts nudging the translator in the ribs, and he whispers to her: “Madam! I am waiting for the verb!”
I’m currently re-reading James White’s Sector General stories, and am struck comparing the difference in size between Google Translate and the immense computer power and energy required for his world’s equivalent. Nevertheless, I worry that language nuance will be lost as all language will be reduced to the lowest common Google translated denominator.
@12/David H Olivier: Yeah, it’s hard to get smooth instantaneous translation in languages that use different word orders. For instance, I was just watching a subtitled Japanese TV episode recently, and that’s a language where the subject tends to come toward the end of the sentence. There was a moment of dramatic revelation where the hero’s old mentor made a declaration that translated as, “Yes! The one who murdered your father was… me!” They had to phrase the translation that way to fit the dramatic pause in his delivery, but it’s a clumsy word order in English.
I wrote a spec novel a few years back involving a human-alien first contact, and I wanted the aliens’ translators to have some initial clumsiness rendering their speech into English, so I actually put their dialogue through an online auto-translate program, going through a couple of different languages before coming back to English. I didn’t directly copy how it turned out, but it helped give me some ideas for how terms and concepts might be distorted through machine translation.
Universal translators are cool, but I’m starting to think a good protocol droid would be even better (just don’t keep taking him outside of his comfort zone. I’m pretty sure that’s what gave 3P0 most of his issues).
This is very very cool.
@3 – Chris: That’s easy. The universal translator picks up certain thought waves, and his condition obviously scrambled his thought processes, and rendered them untranslatable. /headcanon
In Japanese the subject/theme comes at the beginning and the verb at the end. What you describe is probably an attributive sentence (the equivalent of a relative clause) which comes before the noun it modifies (like an attributive adjective in English).
This “new invention” doesn’t sound new at all. Someone just combined a speech recognition program, Google Translate, a cell phone and earbuds. That doesn’t suddenly improve the quality of machine translation.
@11, AG: Thanks! That was a good one! Good singer too.
@12, David: Good old German joke.
@13, Christopher: I like what you did for the spec novel. Good way to go about getting something besides English, or English as done by Yoda, in syntax.
@16/MaGnUs: I don’t think that the universal translator works on “thought waves”, because wouldn’t that make it a mind-reading machine? The Star Trek universe would be a different place if they had mind-reading machines.
In my headcanon, the cloud creature actively sent out its thoughts in some measurable form. The universal translator works on sound waves, but after Spock had “widened its pattern of reception”, it could also receive whatever it was the cloud creature emitted.
@17/birgit: The basic word order in Japanese is SOV (subject-object-verb), but the word order is relatively free, so the subject and the object may be interchanged. As far as I know, the main verb has to come at the end, though.
@18: I often watch it when I need motivation and/or a laugh.
@12: Mark Twain said something about a German diving into a sea of verbiage and emerging on the other side with their verb in their teeth.
In German main clauses the verb always comes in second place, only in subordinate clauses it comes at the end. Mark Twain was probably talking about sentences where the auxiliary comes in second place and the rest of the predicate at the end.
This whole discussion is just making me miss German classes. :-)
@19 – Jana: It can’t read thoughts. It processes sounds and matches it to certain brainwave patterns, and uses that to come up with the translations.
@24/MaGnUs: Except the UT was introduced in “Metamorphosis” as a way of communicating with a creature that didn’t make any sounds. It was explicitly described as a device that “compares the frequency of brain wave patterns” that are universal to all intelligent life. That’s just another way of saying it reads thoughts.
Alright, but maybe it’s not powerful enough to read anything but “surface thoughts”, that is, what you’re vocalizing. Yes, it’s not really scientifically accurate, I guess, but that’s TV for you.
@25/Christopher: Oh, you’re right, I didn’t remember that line! But I think that the UT also processes sounds, for several reasons: Firstly and most importantly, if you build a translation machine to talk to beings who emit sound, it would be dumb not to use this source of information. Secondly, I doubt that the specific details and nuances of a spoken statement can be retrieved from “universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life”. Then, how could the scanning of brain waves work when they talk to people on a different spaceship? And finally, the translator scenes in ENT’s “Civilization” and Beyond seem to suggest that it also processes sound.
So, I’d say that MaGnUs is right. The translator can recognise certain brain wave patterns that help it make sense of the sounds a speaker emits and thus learn a language much faster than would otherwise be possible, but it isn’t a full-fledged telepathic machine. Kirk gave a simplified explanation to Cochrane, concentrating on the most relevant aspect in the given situation: How is it possible to talk to a cloud creature that doesn’t make sounds?
@27/Jana: Yes, of course, in general terms, it’s assumed that the UT processes sounds. The point is that “Metamorphosis,” the episode that introduced the UT, explicitly depicted it as a mind-reading machine, and that’s a problem because it contradicts the rest of the franchise by giving the Federation a technological ability it’s never shown to possess anywhere else. I’m not pretending there’s a consistent reality here, I’m discussing the inconsistencies between different episodes and the assumptions they made. This is one of many examples in Trek where the needs of a specific episode end up producing an implausibly advanced technology that’s never seen again — like the transporter de-aging technology in “The Lorelei Signal” (though “Unnatural Selection” did something similar) or the quick-cloning tech seen in “A Man Alone.”
@28/Christopher: Sorry for explaining the obvious! But I think that Kirk‘s explanation is worded in sufficiently general terms that the UT may be a mind-reading machine, or not.
This leaves the problem that it works without sound input in the episode. I imagine that it can only do so when it deals with telepaths. For telepathic communication to work, surely something must leave the brain. I imagine that this “something” resembles spoken language on some structural level, and that’s what the UT picks up after Spock’s modifications.
@29 – Jana: Yeah, of course, telepathy would have to send some sort of signal… so let’s say that regular speech also sends some sort of signal; only it’s almost imperceptible. The UT picks that up, and not actual “thoughts”, it doesn’t get into your mind, it just picks up on what you’re aiming to communicate.