NET NEWS: Making Sense of a Tower of Babel
Science · 1999
In a tour de force for translating languages by computer, six people in six countries speaking in six tongues have carried on a spontaneous conversation electronically, without any human interpreters. On 22 July, Carnegie Mellon University scientists and colleagues from five other countries in the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR) held a video conference (via digital phone lines) to demonstrate new computer translation technology. Posing as travel agents and tourists, the scientists chatted about trips they planned to take to each other's countries—from Pittsburgh to Kyoto, for example—while computers instantly translated.