Fluent Machines aims to break through the language barrier

The CIO-level business angle on the latest tech

Habla espanol?  Parlate italiano?  Sprechen Sie Deutsches?  The question, of course, is whether you speak another language. 

Learning to speak a second or third language can be time consuming and challenging.  What if you find out today that next week you're being sent on a business trip to another country where the residents speak a language that you don't know?  Your task is to negotiate a complex contract with a potential new client.  The discussions are expected to be conducted in the client's native language, which isn't English. Panic time?

Today, the most likely solution is that you'd have a human translator with you.  In the not-too-distant future, however, your translator might well be on your notebook or handheld PC.  Coming soon to a computer near you:  reliable, accurate human-quality machine translation of numerous languages.

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Habla espanol?  Parlate italiano?  Sprechen Sie Deutsches?  The question, of course, is whether you speak another language. 

Learning to speak a second or third language can be time consuming and challenging.  What if you find out today that next week you're being sent on a business trip to another country where the residents speak a language that you don't know?  Your task is to negotiate a complex contract with a potential new client.  The discussions are expected to be conducted in the client's native language, which isn't English. Panic time?

Today, the most likely solution is that you'd have a human translator with you.  In the not-too-distant future, however, your translator might well be on your notebook or handheld PC.  Coming soon to a computer near you:  reliable, accurate human-quality machine translation of numerous languages.

A company called Fluent Machines is working on a machine translation application that is expected to be faster and more accurate than any other computer-based translation system in existence today.  The key to Fluent Machines' application is two patent-pending processes developed by its parent company, Meaningful Machines.

The first process enables a computer to automatically generate a database of translated word-strings by examining written text of any kind.  These word-strings could be phrases, entire sentences, or other word combinations.  The system then uses statistical analysis on a large number of documents and begins to distill the translation of all the components of the texts.

The second process connects contiguous translated word-strings in a target language with human-quality accuracy.  The system can automatically build many new, longer word-strings each time a new entry is made to the cross-language database.

There is a synergy between the two processes that allows the system to translate many more word-strings in many more languages, faster, more efficiently and with higher accuracy than other machine translation systems.

As a result, Fluent Machines' application can translate between any two languages for which it has a cross-language database.  Unlike other machine translation applications where cross-language databases are built one at a time between each language pairing - say, English and Japanese - the Fluent Machines' approach is to build the cross-reference databases - between every language and every other language - simultaneously.  One significant benefit to this approach to translation is that it is very well suited for translation among very different languages, such as English-Chinese and English-Arabic.

It's fun to imagine some of the possible uses for a very accurate machine translation application:

* Business - conducting truly global meetings with customers, partners and employees in multiple countries.
* Education - teaching immigrant children whose primary language is not the native language of the school.
* Public sector - improving services for foreign-born residents.
* Government - negotiating treaties with other countries with a better understanding of each party's concerns.
* Defense - improving our intelligence of developments in other countries.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.