Listen & Learn Blog

Ideally, if you are visiting a foreign country it would be nice if you were able to speak the language, and get by as well as you would in your own country, conversing naturally, and not coming up against any stumbling blocks. Clearly though, this is not always practical and if you haven’t been fortunate enough to learn the language of the country you are visiting you may need to search for a more convenient solution.

In this instance, you may well be in luck. Apple has just launched the iSpeak translator for its iPhone (and iPod Touch). In a nutshell, this allows the user to convert words and sentences from English to another language, and vice versa. The biggest problem for most people when attempting to speak another language is how to pronounce the words in a given language. Well, in this app you are able to type out your word or phrase and have your device translate it into another language and speak it aloud for you. Thus avoiding those awkward moments where you cannot pronounce something and cause yourself some embarrassment.

Additionally, the app is relatively low priced, usually at £1 or so. It does, however, focus almost exclusively on European languages, although the relative benefits or otherwise of this fall down to the individual user. Given this though Apple does plan to, inevitably, expand to other languages in due course.

This app will of course prove invaluable to those on holiday in Europe. It is often expressed by British tourists in Europe that in popular holiday destinations there is no need for them to learn any proportion of the language as the residents will be used to tourists and they will know enough for both parties to get by. But it doesn’t hurt for the tourist to go prepared and armed with the necessary equipment to converse in a helpful manner.

The software does have its faults, however. Ideally, one would like to able to speak to the device and have it convert this into the other language. Given the limitations of speech recognition software currently this may be a hope to far. These are all considerations for Apple to take in its future software development.

There are occasions when an item appears in the news that one suspects has only surfaced because of its controversial nature, or because the person behind the story is seeking some self publication. One suspects this might well be the situation in the case of the Reverend Michael Land, the vicar in the countryside village of Burghill.

He, controversially obviously, has urged his parishioners to adopt swearing in their everyday language. Clearly the word ‘urged’ implies some sort of coercion on his part. And indeed this appears to be the case. He has stated that too many people put Jesus on a pedestal and that people should realise that he was only human too. Because, he says, that Jesus was relatively uneducated and did not mix with the elite of his day.

While this may very well be true, though one can’t help but feel that this is a shameless act of self promotion. After all, there seems to be no relevance to the statement. What is the point behind the it? If you wanted to be supportive and actively look for a reason to uphold this statement I suppose you could reflect on the fact that the vicar has said that the church are at risk of becoming out of touch with ‘ordinary’ people. Although one can’t help but think that there must be better ways to go about it than this.

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with swearing, even the best of us will blurt out the odd swearword or two now and then, it is somewhat inevitable. Perhaps we should be more generous, however. The Reverend Land has been involved in several community projects that have helped the afflicted, such as drug users. The man himself had an incident where he describes and incident with another road user.

“Someone pulled out in front of me so I sounded my horn. The driver got out of his car and came over to me. “I wound my window down and said ‘why don’t you learn to f***ing drive’. He just walked away. I don’t think he could believe it. “I did not remove my clerical collar, why should I? I did it then and I’d do it again, I’m not afraid to tell it how it is even if that means swearing.”Just because I am a vicar I am not a soft touch. “The church needs to modernise and that means keeping up with the trends in language.”

Rather than judging it is perhaps a point remembering that, like Jesus, members of the clergy are only human too.

How pedantic should we be about the language use we stumble across in our everyday lives? Taking a look at the letters page in the newspapers on almost any day of the week demonstrates that even the slightest misdemeanour in language gets complained about, whether this is an older person complaining about the ‘youth’ speak of today, or someone picking up the tiniest detail in a news article.

Examples include the correct use of a word and when it should be used. And of course, the dreaded apostrophe. When to use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ is one that frequently rears its head, I am not going to go into definitions here but there are those who know exactly the difference and those who wouldn’t have the slightest clue. The question that we must ask ourselves is does it matter? Often one can get a sense of the correct usage simply but vocalising the sentence and listening to which one makes the most sense. But if someone gets it wrong it hardly matters, does it? After all, there is no doubt that these words could be used interchangeably and the reader will fully understand what the writer is saying every time.

The apostrophe. Some local councils in the UK have taken to not including it on street signs whatsoever. A blanket policy, which makes it clear that no matter the meaning or the different intonations that there could be from such an exclusion, it is stating this is the way it does things.

The Times has a pedant’s column, I often wonder if this is written tongue in cheek or not. I like to think it is, taking a small but necessary poke at how ridiculous such pedantry can be, highlighted in deeply analysed detail.

Has the word ‘pedant’ come to construe negative connotations? I certainly think that it is at least edging this way. We tend to use the word now to describe someone who is overly fussy and enjoys picking out the slightest details of other’s mistakes, often with a definite touch of schadenfreude.

I have written in this blog before that language does and must evolve and there is little we can do to stop such positive progress. Does this mean that we must tolerate the incessant whinging of those who seem to have nothing better to do than take the time and effort to write into a publication? In a tolerant society I guess that we must, safe in the knowledge that they are kicking the wall while spelling, semantics, punctuation and grammar changes around them.

Volunteers from the Conservative party are to distribute 2000 English dictionaries to teachers in Rwanda in order to help with the teaching and subsequent development of the language in the country.

Rwanda, which joined the Commonwealth in 2009, has previously been more inclined to the French language as it is a former Belgian colony. The Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, is purported to be influential in this move as he blames France for influencing the Hutu genocide of 1994.

The volunteers have been going to Rwanda every year since 2007 as part of Project Umubano where they have taught, amongst other subjects, English, law and business skills. Tory whip, Stephen Crabb, describes some of the reasons for the dictionaries being sent to teachers and school examiners ‘The government of Rwanda has taken a strategic decision to move to an Anglophone based economy and education system. That fits in with the Commonwealth. That ties in with their national vision of becoming a middle income country by 2020. The education work we are doing fits into that in a small way.’

He feels that a country such as Rwanda is a good starting point for such a project as it an African country with no colonial ties to Britain. The project has also been extended to Sierra Leone. Says Crabb ‘The Sierra Leone component is doubling in size this year, responding to specific requests we have received from inside the country with our partners on the ground. We will be expanding the justice work with our team of lawyers and also putting in volunteers with medical expertise.’

The distribution of dictionaries demonstrates the need to assist in developing countries’ welfare. Although this may be seen by some as a small gesture, the development of the English language in such a country could do a lot to further their social and economic climate. It is widely accepted that those who have English language skills will have greater opportunities for employment in the English speaking world.

This will contribute to the country’s financial welfare, through taxes etc. It is perhaps a good example of what developed countries can do to further developing countries’ welfare. Taken as a pilot scheme, it should be admired. Not just because of aid from the UK, but as a trend setter for other countries in a similar position to offer help.

Language changes and evolves; this is an undisputed fact, as can be seen by looking at the evolution of the English language over the centuries. Although the effects can also be observed over a much shorter space of time, even within the last two months, two weeks, or two days.

Given this, however, it comes as no surprise that some sections of the media have worked themselves up into a frenzy about the recent language indiscretions of US politician Sarah Palin. She has used the word ‘refudiate’ on her Twitter page to call on Muslims to reject (or ‘refudiate’) plans for a controversial mosque than would be part of the new building plans at the World Trade Center in New York.

The question that is put forward by the media is, inevitably, that should someone who intends to run as a presidential candidate in the next elections be so blasé about the language that they speak? Who hasn’t made the odd indiscretion when speaking, especially when speaking in public where even the best and most experienced public speakers can sometimes become tongue tied?

She has since changed her word to ‘reject’ in her tweets, but has also used words such as ‘misunderestimate’. She has shrugged off the fuss by saying that Shakespeare made up words, although this is probably a step too far in comparison. Quoted as saying “Refudiate, misunderestimate, wee-wee’d up. English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin words, too.”. A living language it certainly is.

And she has a point, you cannot stand in the way of the natural evolution of language. It will change regardless of people’s objections to it doing so; otherwise we run the risk of language being stilted. After all, some words need to be invented, in particular when we come up with new technological developments on an almost daily basis. Teenagers invent new words, or abbreviate words, constantly, another example where conservative newspapers often find themselves up in arms.

Perhaps rather than being over reactive in our response to occasions such as this, we should be more accepting and realise, and indeed relish, the inevitable.

There are often news stories about languages in far out places being in decline, sometimes this is because of a more dominant language, as is the case with Welsh and Cornish in the UK. And sometimes there are geographical reasons, highlighted recently in Taiwan. Taiwan is considered by a number of anthropologists to be the source of Austronesian languages, and it is here that some of the indigenous languages are in danger of fading away altogether.

There are fourteen indigenous languages in Taiwan and seven of them are on Unesco’s critical list. Chang Shin-liang, head of the language and culture department of the government’s Council of Indigenous Peoples has reasoned that this is mainly because the current younger generation’s parents cannot speak their ancient language. Their grandparents can, but as Chinese has slowly become the dominant culture this has taken over with the modern generation.

“We’re facing a dangerous situation for indigenous languages. Seven out of 14 indigenous languages here are listed by Unesco as critically endangered,” said Mr Chang.

“Many people in their 40s and 50s can’t speak their mother-tongue, so they can’t teach it to the younger generation. The younger people also think ‘I’m fine if I can speak Mandarin and English; learning indigenous languages doesn’t help me increase my competitiveness’.”

Indeed this may be the very crux of the matter. What incentive is there for the younger person to want to learn the language? There is certainly no inherent need for them to do so. Likely the only method may be to get them interested in history and their lineage, perhaps they will never become fluent but maybe this is better than the language being forever consigned to the history books.

It is along these lines of incentivising the young that summers camps are being set up in Taiwan by the government. These are designed to teach children about ancestral worshipping rituals, storytelling and music etc in a hope to get them interested and along the way teach them the languages of their forbears. Although not everyone agrees with this method it certainly shows that the government is willing to do something in order to preserve these languages. It can be very easy for a government to not do anything. After all, there is no pure monetary reason for them to do so. It does show however that within an ancient language there can be a lot to learn about past culture.

For anyone who derrises the usefulness of universities in real word application, you don’t need to look too far to find examples of innovation, an example of which is last week’s Imagine Cup. The Imagine Cup is a software development contest sponsored by Microsoft; four students from Thailand who entered their speech to sign language translation software have won the main category of the competition.

Of course, with the competition being sponsored by Microsoft all entrants were required to use Microsoft software development platforms on which to design their end product. Their software also had to further one or more of the United Nation’s millennium goals. The Thai team’s software is Eyefeel, which combines speech recognition, face recognition and sign language animation in order to provide real time translation for those who have hearing problems.

Team captain Pichai Sodsai describes the team’s software, “The voice recognition module captures the speech and converts the sentence so it fits the grammar of sign language”, “The sign language is then animated on the screen, while face recognition is used to distinguish different speakers.”

The software is not without a few teething troubles, however, notably the lag in the translation owing to the innate tendency of sign language to struggle in keeping up with real time speech. Given time these problems will be overcome, “It is a huge challenge to deal with,” said Sodsai. “We deal with most of the problem by letting the software automatically shorten the sentence.”

But what about the commercial considerations of the results of the competition? Jon Perera, General Manager of the Microsoft Education Group says “In terms of real world applicability, some of the software [has the potential to] land in the real world market and will have the impact the students want it to have. And, certainly, we see a lot of software that won’t necessarily become a commercial or a long term viable solution in the market.”

The competition also revealed other ideas “Some solutions are already being used by governments. The team from Jordan for example built a ‘desertification tracking system,’ which is a self-powered embedded chipset board that tracks the growth of the desert over time,” Perera said. “The government of Jordan is partnering with them and is sponsoring the team to have several sites tracked.”

We live in a diverse and multicultural society, where numerous different languages are spoken across the country. Teachers may often find themselves in the situation where they have new pupils who are unable to speak English. Of course, over time the pupil will pick the language up, but the challenge for teachers is to find a way in which to speed the process up or make it easier.

This is particularly true of Manor Park Primary School in Aston, Birmingham, where over 50 per cent of its pupils do not speak English. The school has become the first school in the UK to use a “Talking Tutor” computer, and give one to every student. This computer enables the pupils to type in their native language, which the computer then translates and vocalises. The teachers can then use it to respond back to the pupil. Its use is not limited to his however, useful as it is; it also allows other pupils to communicate with each other.

Naturally, not everyone is happy with this development, arguing that it stifles progress in students learning the language for themselves. Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education is one of these. He told the Daily Express
“Surely it would be better to give foreign-speaking youngsters an intensive course in English before they start school,”
“There is a danger that this computer translator will keep children within their own social group, which could be damaging to their future prospects.
“When these children leave school they will not be able to rely on translators – even more reason why they should learn how to speak English from a young age.”

In defence of the scheme, the head teacher of the school has come forward stating “It can vary but at any one time we have 30-plus languages being spoken at the school, so this is invaluable to us. Last week we enrolled a pupil from Gambia who could speak only a tribal language, so we checked online to see if we had something that closely matched. We found the closest match and both child and parent could understand us.”

Ultimately, they probably both have a point. While on the one hand the computers may prove to be a very helpful tool, they should not get in the way of, or slow down, the students’ progress in learning the language for themselves.

What if everyone in the world could speak to each other no matter what language they spoke? Perhaps the realm of science fiction? Well, no longer. Earlier this year users participated in SuperPower Nation Day, an experiment in multilingual discussion. The creators of the experiment designed a website that could be used to talk to another person, and be able to communicate in their language, regardless of whether the other user didn’t speak the same language as them.

Although users could also participate in the debate by telephone, using interpreters, those who were taking part online had their messages automatically translated using Google Translate software. The six languages involved in the experiment were English, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Persian, Indonesian and Spanish. The question for the experimenters before they began was whether using the computer and the translation software would allow users to communicate easily.

Yes, Google’s translation software has been available online for some time but the real test here was how it would stand up in real time conversation, where it would have to be able to translate quickly and effectively. There was always going to be some errors involved however, but on the whole there was eighty to ninety percent effectiveness.

Some of the problem lies in the fact that not everyone speaks a perfect representation of their language all of the time. What about slang terms, new words, uncommon or out of date usage? These are just some of the problems that will need to be rectified in the future. Chewy Trewhella, new business development manager for Google said “There’s always going to be slang, but we´re getting better at it all the time.”

Interestingly, some of the participants in the experiment opted to type not in their native language but in English. Perhaps this is because they thought they could do a better job than the software, or maybe it’s because some users are so used to using the internet in the English language that for them it was simple the default position.

So what are the future applications of this? Possibly the biggest benefit will be for businesses, especially those that often make use of online conferencing tools. If employees are able to type and converse with associates across the world, regardless of their language this is surely going to be a cost effective tool. More interestingly, in the future will the software be able to operate on a vocal level?

Internet content is written in many different languages other than English, and this can pose a problem to search engines if the user selects to receive results from any country. The problem stems from the difficulties involved in translating a foreign language into English, or vice versa.

Anyone who has ever used this service, or any other online translation software to decipher what the phrase says, will quickly realise that accuracy is nowhere near what it might be. The difficulty lies in teaching a computer and its software to be able to understand grammar, semantics, tenses, verb use etc and to be able to understand them in both languages, and how to translate between the two.

However, the technology may have been taken a step further by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Researchers there have designed a language mapping system that has been able to translate an ancient Semitic language, called Ugaritic, in the amazingly short time of a couple of hours. Their research, they believe, could have great application in language translation systems.

The basis for the system’s operation is described in yesterday’s press release by the MIT news office, which describes the assumptions that the system works on ‘The first is that the language being deciphered is closely related to some other language: In the case of Ugaritic, the researchers chose Hebrew. The next is that there’s a systematic way to map the alphabet of one language on to the alphabet of the other, and that correlated symbols will occur with similar frequencies in the two languages.’

‘The system makes a similar assumption at the level of the word: The languages should have at least some cognates, or words with shared roots, like main and mano in French and Spanish, or homme and hombre. And finally, the system assumes a similar mapping for parts of words. A word like “overloading,” for instance, has both a prefix — “over” — and a suffix — “ing.” The system would anticipate that other words in the language will feature the prefix “over” or the suffix “ing” or both, and that a cognate of “overloading” in another language — say, “surchargeant” in French — would have a similar three-part structure.’

The system goes a long way towards making translation software, such as Google Translate, significantly more accurate. Further, its application in businesses and as a catalyst for further types of language technology may prove invaluable.