Skip to main content

Skype Translate

This is quite an exciting development. Microsoft have been working for 15 years on a "Star Trek style" translator which will work in real time. We already have machine translation and text-to-speech, but Microsoft that the Skype Translator is not just a "daisy chain" combination of existing technologies. I have no idea how the new system works, but the researchers are talking about neural networks and the system being able to improve itself by while learning new languages.

For the moment the system is tied in with Skype and we do not know if you will have to pay for it. A portable device which provided instantaneous verbal translation would be very useful too.

Is this all good news? I think it is. It should bring people closer together. Not everyone can learn new languages easily and people who could not communicate will now be able to do so. I can see this technology being used in a business context, by tourists with hand-held devices and for social communication. The translations are not entirely accurate, but are more than adequate for everyday communication and should get better.

Will it in the longer run reduce the motivation of students or put teachers out of a job? Well, it will take a little persuasion to convince students that there is no real substitute for speaking and understanding the language and enjoying all this entails in terms of personal fulfilment and accessing other cultures. The reality is that only a minority of monolingual Britons achieve fluency in another language. "Universal translators" will be of enormous benefit to them.

Here's the video:




Comments

  1. I'm holding out for the Babelfish ;)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,