I'll finally be able to understand my French teacher

By Clay Breshears (Intel) (79 posts) on April 23, 2008 at 1:24 pm

An article in New Scientist reports that Terrence Deacon, UC Berkeley, believes a universal translation device would be feasible and would even be able to work with aliens from another planet.  We would need to know more about how language is structured than we do now, but Prof. Deacon thinks that there is a universal structure to all languages.  This structure would arise from the fact that language is tied to the common goal of describing the physical environment of the speakers. 

It's an intriguing notion (and something that will require lots of processing power from manycore chips).  The classic SF chestnut of using mathematics to gloss over how two alien cultures begin communicating has some believability.  In "Contact," aliens initiate communication with humans through prime numbers.  Is it too hard to imagine that, even though planets might vary widely, there are enough environmental commonalities to be able to find correlating "words" between us and them.  We have rocks, aliens have rocks.  We have hands, aliens have tentacles (but when they say "g9l%Bi*df" and wave them, we'll figure out what they mean).

I'm not convinced that we could be able to translate smells (Priest-Kings of Gor) or light emissions (Toshi in Pandora's Star) in truly alien races.  I'll be impressed enough when we can get such a device to work between different Earth languages (Opish, Ubbi Dubbi, or Pig Latin, anyone?).  When we can talk to dolphins, then I'll really think we might actually communicate with aliens using a universal translator device.  (I just hope "Klaatu Borada Nicktoe" doesn't end up being "Don't forget to pick up Klaatu's dry cleaning.")

Categories: Multicore

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By Intel® Software Network Blogs » Hop, Skip, and a Jump to understanding my French teacher on May 7th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
[...] my last post I highlighted efforts to construct an automatic language translator.  Now, I've found that there [...]


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