Lost in translation: do interpreter apps work?
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Lost in translation: do interpreter apps
work?
By Kevin Rawlinson
BBC News
11 February 2015
From
the section Technology
Bilbao
The BBC road-tested a host of translation
apps in the Spanish Basque city Bilbao
They are going to remove language barriers
forever. Or so it has been claimed.
Google recently released a real-time
translator, while Microsoft-owned Skype is beta-testing its own.
Both firms make grand claims about their
services, while other smaller rivals offer alternatives, but the question
remains: do they actually work?
I took a selection of apps to Bilbao in the
Spanish Basque Country to find out, testing them by completing tasks set for me
by colleagues on the BBC's tech desk.
The first job was to find the northern
city's Guggenheim museum and ask what was its most valuable work of art.
Getting to the museum was not a challenge;
another Google app saw to that. The problem was getting my question across.
line
Bilbao to-do list
Basque flag
Get to Guggenheim museum and find out what
is its most highly insured work of art
Get to Moyua metro station and ask someone
there the best way to get to Plaza Nueva
In Plaza Nueva find someone to tell the
story of their first kiss
Find Gili-Gili and ask someone inside to
take a selfie posing with you and an item sold there
Catch a taxi to Cafeteria Concha and, when
you arrive, ask what their bestselling pintxo is
Go to the city's bullfighting museum and
ask the staff inside how many people the bullring could hold when full and when
the original was destroyed
Buy a one euro stamp and postcard and send
it to the Tech team
line
Google Translate doesn't yet support spoken
Basque, so I opted for its English-to-Spanish setting.
Despite near-perfect conditions - indoors
with no background noise and a volunteer who was familiar with the concept of
the real-time translators - it initially struggled to convey relatively simple
phrases.
"OK, so I've arrived at the Guggenheim
and I'm here with Begoña and I have to ask her a question, according to my list
of things to do," became "ok so the rise of the guggenheim and and
and i have got acid? On my list of things to do."
While it got it the second time round, the
answer that came back was not exactly perfect:
The piece of art mask museum's own
collection is a Rothko painting called Untitled
It was, at least, comprehensible. An
inauspicious start, nevertheless.
First kiss
At nearby Moyua metro station, the app had
to face an even stiffer test - one that exposed what is perhaps its biggest
weaknesses: background noise and the rigours of real life.
The weather was crisp but dry when I
managed to stop a woman at the building's entrance to ask for the quickest
route to the old town's main square.
By the time she had grasped the concept of
listening for a translation into Spanish and answering the question clearly and
slowly - delivering the directions bit-by-bit and waiting for the app to catch
up - a sudden hailstorm had struck, shaking her resolve to persevere with
struggling software and British tourist alike.
Nevertheless, I eventually found Plaza
Nueva.
There sat 22-year-old Yurena, who agreed to
share the story of her first kiss with me.
Apparently, it was at a party in Bilbao.
She cuddled up with Miguel on the sofa and then "muy bien". The
couple are still together, she said.
A romantic story, without doubt.
Unfortunately, none of it told using Google's real-time translator, which could
not deal with the fact that she was speaking at the speed of a normal
conversation.
Bilbao
Yurena dispensed with the realtime
translator, which couldn't keep up with her
In the end, Yurena had to give up and type
her message manually, pressing a button to get it translated into text for me
to read.
Her task was made no easier when Google
Translate turned "can you speak slower, please" into "can you
speak Spanish Big Show".
Una selfie, por favor
Vocre
Vocre supports 38 languages, but is not
free like some rival apps
Vocre is one of the most prominent other
apps to provide real-time translations. And, at Bilbao's bullfighting museum,
it achieved a similar rate of success to Google's.
Converting between English and Spanish, it
managed to convey a question about the bullring's capacity relatively well.
The answer that came back from staff member
Joaquín Vega was clearly mangled: "Around 14 thousandth people."
Imperfect, but at least it was
understandable.
Such apps performed best with measured
speech and low background noise, as illustrated by my experience in Gili-Gili -
a local clothes shop.
Inside, where it was relatively quiet,
Google Translate managed to convey my request for a posed selfie almost
perfectly.
After some explanation of how the system
worked, Pedro Aramaio - who spoke little or no English - agreed to pose for the
photo, ticking another task off my list.
That was, however, a brief highlight.
Bilbao
Pedro Aramaio agreed to pose for a selfie
after conversing using Google's app
At nearby Cafeteria Concha, which was
significantly louder, the same app had trouble picking out any speech at all.
The barman there professed to speak very
little English.
But when the software took an age to detect
my request to identify his bestselling pintxo - a word for Basque bar snacks -
he opted to attempt an answer in my language, rather than to persevere with the
smartphone.
Bilbao
That's definitely not what I said
'Awkward' apps
If real-time translation apps can get it
right, they could upend a lucrative sector.
According to a recent report by the
Economist newspaper - which cited consulting firm Common Sense Advisory - the
language interpretation industry generates about $37bn (£24bn) worth of sales
every year.
But the problems I experienced in Bilbao
suggest that processor-powered translations still have far to go.
Those issues are indicative of speech
recognition tech's limitations in general, according to Joseba Abaitua, an
academic at the modern foreign languages department at Bilbao's University of
Deusto.
Mr Abaitua, who specialises in online
communication, suggests that interacting via a smartphone while face-to-face
with someone else is always going to be "awkward". But, he adds, apps
will become more effective as people get used to them.
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Media caption
Testing Skype's real-time translator
"In a way, you have to… make a
compromise, you have to know who are you talking to - you are talking to a
speech recogniser, a machine," he says.
"So, the machine can start
understanding you quite well and, if your sentences are short and well
recognised, the translation system… may make a good job.
"But, if you start talking unexpected
things with a lot of colloquialism, then the whole system breaks down."
He adds that systems need to get much
better at recognising people's different accents and ways of speaking.
Bilbao
None of the apps had Basque, but they did
have Spanish
Smartphone-based translators also face
technical limitations, such as their reliance on internet connections and
limited battery life.
And, in some cases, they simply promise
more than they can deliver.
One app I tried called Interpreter
steadfastly refused to live up to its name.
When I attempted to use it to find a
postcard shop it failed to translate either my questions or the replies I was
given, despite near-ideal conditions.
A helpful shopkeeper ultimately had to
regress to pen and paper to draw a crude map of the area.
Eventually, I bought a stamp and card to
send back to London. But not before Google Translate managed to maul this last
request.
"I speak English," the bemused
card salesman said, finally putting me out of my tech-induced misery.
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