How could a universal translator work?

Now that we know there are so many languages could science come up with a way to translate speech in different languages into our native tongue? The answer would be a Universal Translator. I say ‘would be’ because right now it’s just a science fiction idea. The first mention of this idea was in ‘First Contact’, a 1945 novel by Murray Leinster. The idea has also been used in Doctor Who, Farscape, Stargate, Star Trek and many other Science Fiction stories.

But, how would a real translator work? That’s a very interesting question because it involves understanding the organizational elements of languages and proposing an algorithm that could be used to actually translate between languages. Supposedly, Google is working on such a translator, and as you might have guessed, the United States Army is working on a similar project.

The concept of Speech Translation has already been demonstrated going back to 1983 when NEC Corporation demonstrated the concept at the 1983 ITU Telecom World. In 1997 Robert Palmquist released an English-Spanish large vocabulary system as part of on Office of Naval Research funded project. The C-Star-2 consortium demonstrated speech to speed translation in five languages in 1999, and as recent as 2009 SpeechGear has released Version 4.0 of their Compardre:Interact translation product that can instantly translate between English and 29 other languages. There are also apps for smart phones that can translate speech in different languages.

However, there are many technical problems connected to this idea. One of these is the wide variation in spoken English better known as dialect. The idea is akin to the problems of dictation software that is able to take your speech and turn it into text. Usually, the dictation software goes through a leaning period in order to get used to your particular speech patterns before it can do its job.

Dictation software would become the front end of a universal translator system. Once the software translates your speech into words, then it would look up the words in a language dictionary and then use words to speech programming to turn it back to speech in another language.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with grammar and syntax. Every language has its own specific way of handling syntax. A dictation program doesn’t have to worry about that because it assumes that you the speaker are using proper grammar, but a reconciliation of a particular language’s syntax is a major detriment to developing a universal translator.

Creating a universal translator for speech-to-speech translation involving Earth languages is one thing, but making it translate alien speech would be a very difficult project. We don’t know how aliens think, and if their languages are not like those we’re familiar with, the concept would fail.

There are some who believe that all languages, even alien ones, would have basic recognizable elements. However, this idea cannot be verified until we make contact. All I can say is that it would be a very interesting project to work on if linguistics is your life’s work.

Thanks for reading.