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 English translation tool
New internet "translation" tool brings scientific know-how closer to foreign students I find that one of the greatest challenges of our time is that of communications, one of the fastest growing industries. However, once communication is achieved between individuals, the next step is that of understanding. The English language is the predominant language for human interaction across the whole world today - 67% of the Internet traffic is in English, most of the top Universities, business transactions, entertainment as well as scientific and technological publications all use English. Many translating tools are available to translate between languages but they are in general of very low quality due to the complexities of correctly deriving the equivalence between words and phrases in two distinct natural languages. Translation is difficult for numerous reasons, including the lack of one-to-one word correspondences among languages, the existence in every language of homonyms (things for which there are a number of names), and the fact that natural grammars are idiosyncratic; they do not conform to an exact set of rules that would facilitate direct, word-to-word substitution. On Internet, if we consider scientific and technological words, the required vocabulary comes close to 100,000 words and is therefore well beyond the capacity of the average English as a foreign language student. Many artificial intelligence research efforts have been directed, and their limited success testifies to the complexity of trying to make computers understand these idiosyncrasies. One alternative is to interact in a language which is widely understood and which many people wish to learn, even if at a basic conversational level such as the English language. The difficulty then arises of how to convert complex material into every-day English!... Chinese writing for instance possesses more than 40,000 mainly ideographic signs, but knowledge of four thousand is enough for most purposes. Chinese writing, insofar as it is phonetic, is also monosyllabic, for the very good reason that the words of the language consist of only one syllable, with a large number of homophones (different words that sound the same), which made it important to have signs that distinguished between these homophones, and so the script avoided being purely phonetic. Even in this case, early simplification resulted in a selection of 1,200 of the traditional characters, in order to form what can be called Basic Chinese, enabling illiterate people to read in this system after four months work. A later refinement by Yuan Chao produced a system of about 2,500 of the traditional characters, which it was claimed can cover basically all of the language. The Japanese resolved the basic linguistic problem by adding Hira Gana, children are taught 1,200 from 40,000 symbols, which often contain a Chinese root and suffixes. Another attempt at devising a simplified version of a language is that of Basic English, as proposed by Charles K. Ogden in the 1920s. The fact that it is possible to say almost everything we normally wish to say with 850 words makes Basic English something extremely attractive. By the addition of 100 words required for any general field such as science, and 50 internationally recognized words, a total of 1,000 words enable successful communication. Clearly, where complex or ambiguous material is being turned from English into a reduced-vocabulary representation, there will be some loss of information. However, material of a legal, business, scientific and technological nature is normally specifically produced in a way that seeks to be both precise and clear, and is therefore amenable to a reduced-vocabulary representation.  Recently, I have come across a new internet portal currently undergoing beta testing - www.simplish.org - which has implemented an automatic translation tool, based on converting Standard English into Basic English, so that a user with a basic conversational level of English can understand English content however complex. For the case of more complex scientific words, these are explained wherever they occur in footnotes using these 1,000 basic words. This service can be used for free twice daily to process small documents, whereas registered users can process files up to 25,000 words, have some space for personal files on the server, as well as add words to a personal dictionary so the system can adapt to each user's level of knowledge. I think that this is a novel and very timely development that will no doubt help the millions of internet users who need to read English texts but have an insufficient level of knowledge of the English language to do so with ease. By Dr. Marcello Funes-Gallanzi, Chairman, The Goodwill Company Ltd.,  England |
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