There are probably around 7,000 spoken languages in the world, but most of us can understand, speak and write only one or two. Some people may know as many as five or six, but no one will know hundreds of languages. There is every chance that you will not be able to understand even one word of another language. In many ways, language is the final frontier of a global planet, which is why so much investment is being made into helping people communicate across countries, continents, and cultures.
This is where translation comes in. Translations enable us to understand what is being said or written in another language. Translations do not have to be verbal – if you have watched a foreign movie with English subtitles, you know what I mean.
Translations come in two varieties – when someone translates another person’s speech on the fly, it is usually called interpreting. The idea is that you interpret what is being said in another language, because it is very difficult to translate languages verbatim. Some puns and play on words, for example, are nearly untranslatable. Written materials, on the other hand, can be translated per se because the translator has access to more time and more expressions.
Today, we honour the work of these translators and interpreters who have made the world a better place by enabling more people to understand what another person is saying in a strange language. Today, International Translation Day, is an opportunity to pay tribute to the work of language professionals, which plays an important role in bringing nations together, facilitating dialogue, understanding and cooperation, contributing to development and strengthening world peace and security. Transposition of a literary or scientific work, including technical work, from one language into another language, is indispensable to preserving clarity, a positive climate and productiveness in international public discourse and interpersonal communication.
But why September 30 ? The date celebrates the feast of St. Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered the patron saint of translators. St. Jerome was a priest from North-eastern Italy, known mostly for his endeavour of translating most of the Bible into Latin from the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. He also translated parts of the Hebrew Gospel into Greek. He was of Illyrian ancestry and his native tongue was the Illyrian dialect. He learnt Latin in school and was fluent in Greek and Hebrew, which he learnt from his studies and travels.
Translation is no easy process. Each language is different from another though there could be broad similarities as most languages have evolved from a common source. This is why, for example, the English word “Water” is similar to the Sinhalese word “Wathura” or “Five” is similar to “Paha”.
But overall, translating one language to another requires a thorough command and understanding of both languages because the translator has to convey all the subtle nuances expressed in the original language in the translated language. Then, the reader does not feel shortchanged or left out. Translation or interpretation becomes a logistical nightmare when you have three languages or more to translate simultaneously – just work out the combinations for Sinhala, Tamil and English. It is even more complex in organizations such as the UN, which has six official languages - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Some core documents are also translated into German.
There will be no humanity without languages. After all, that is what sets us apart from the more advanced primates who cannot speak but who can easily master sign language. Languages, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development, are of strategic importance for people and the planet. There is growing awareness that languages play a vital role in development, in ensuring cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, but also in attaining quality education for all and strengthening cooperation, in building inclusive knowledge societies and preserving cultural heritage, and in mobilizing political will for applying the benefits of science and technology to sustainable development.
The best way to gain an insight into another culture is to learn another language. If you learn French, a journey in France will be instantly more rewarding. But soon, you will not have to worry about learning languages to looking at phrasebooks, because machines will do it for you. Two recent developments have made this possible – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In fact, right now you can head over to Google and translate this entire column into Sinhala or Tamil, all without a human ever touching a keyboard at the other end. Of course, it will not be 100 percent accurate as the machines are learning all the time. In a few years, it will be possible to go to a foreign country and converse effortlessly with the locals via machines that interpret on the fly with 100 percent accuracy.
Facebook has also used artificial intelligence to improve its machine translation models, allowing the social media giant to recognize and translate 24 new languages. The new language translation pairs include Serbian and Belarusian to English in Europe; Zulu and Somali to English in Africa; and Cambodian and Mongolian to English in Asia. More than six billion translations take place on Facebook every day. The new language pairs add to the more than 4,000 available on Facebook today, but are distinct in that they tackle a longstanding problem in machine translation.
Microsoft already enables real-time spoken word translation in Skype across numerous languages, doing so through AI techniques such as deep learning and artificial neural networks. A few months back, Microsoft claimed a “historic milestone” when it said it used AI to match human performance levels in translating news from Chinese to English. LinkedIn has a feature that automatically translates posts in your feed, similar to what Twitter and Facebook have offered.
There is another approach called Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) which combines machine translations with human proofreading and correction. A company that has a head start in this field is Smartcat which integrates with more than 10 machine translation engines, including Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate, Baidu, and Yandex Translate. The reason there are so many is that each engine comes with its own strengths, such as, proficiency in a particular language combination or subject area. Smartcat claims it garnered a 520 percent increase in sales last year, supported by a network of 200,000 linguists and 5,000 registered translation companies.
In fact, the global translation and interpreting services market is a staggering US$ 45 billion industry, while the machine translation industry specifically is estimated to be around US$ 300 million and is expected to hit almost $1 billion by 2023. Translators, both human and machines, will be very busy for centuries to come as we tear the language barriers apart and become one cohesive entity.