Rhymes of History - Module 3

When thinking of the rhymes of history this week, I chose language differences and communication as items for exploration. Language barriers have been the source of some conflicts in history, the workplace, and in social settings. Imagine working with a new colleague who only speaks a language completely dissimilar to you own. The normal day to day routine of the workplace is disrupted when individuals cannot speak or understand the language. From my perspective, we all have a voice that needs to be heard and message we want to send to others. When others do not know what we are asking or stating, we get frustrated and often just give up trying. As Thornburg (2009c) noted, when looking at rhymes of history, we often look at how we utilize new technologies to revisit ideas from our past, even if we are working with the distant past. We are rekindling our inherent desire to share with others through verbal communication. We struggle to do this with those who do not speak our language, essentially causing a language barrier between people.

Enter translation apps, and more specifically, Google Translate. In previous renditions of these devices, words were directly substituted from the target language. In short, it was like looking up passages in a dictionary and piecing them together word by word. Of course, these “translations” were choppy and often times produced inaccurate results. With words like “weather” having different meanings, these searches would only find the word “weather” in the target language and substitute. You might have a sentence like “The house can weather a storm pretty well.” In Spanish, your translation might end up saying something like “La casa lata el tiempo una tormenta bonita pozo.” Each of the words is right but the sentence is something like “The house, can (like soda can), weather (like sunny, cloudy, cool, weather), a storm, pretty (like handsome or cute) well (like the hole in the ground).

As computer power and ability has increased, so have the capabilities of these translation programs. Instead of just looking at word by word definitions, these types of applications look for meaning of whole sentences and try to infer the message the user conveys. Our translations have improved as shown by this newer rendition of my sentence above. Instead of cans and pretty wells, we have a more reasonable, “ La casa se puede capear el temporal bastante bien.” As a Spanish teacher, I would know that this sentence came from a translation application if produced by my students. That said, it is pretty darn close to what the real sentence. The word “tormenta” is how you say storm and would have been the vocabulary word I would have taught.

But, looking beyond my classroom, individuals want to share their message with others in a language they understand. It is very unlikely we all would be able to speak over 1,000 languages and dialects necessary to communicate with everyone, so we need help. We are beginning to get help in the form of mobile translation applications like Google Translate for smart phones. Using an internet connection and the app, an individual can speak (or type), a sentence in their language and have it translated into the language of choice. This also works the other way around. A speaker of a foreign language to the individual could speak into the device and have their words translated into the language the person needs. We are getting closer to having some of the most accurate translations, but still struggle with intonation, inflection, and the nuances of certain words with multiple meanings or with certain verb tenses (subjunctive, imperative, conditional, etc).

So why is a translation application or program helping fulfill the rhyme of history of our communication with others? While gestures are still important in communicating, we don’t have to grunt, point, and pray the other person knows what we are saying. No longer do we have to have multitudes of individuals pouring over reams of documents and translating them for intelligence purposes, or just to read a menu. We need to know what others are communicating and we want to communicate back. These apps facilitate more dialogue with others from different cultures of our own and allow us to improve the global economy and sharing of ideas.

Now if only we could get an accurate translation program that would tell us what our dogs and cats are saying when they share their “voices” with us.

 

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Reference:

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009c). Rhymes of history. Baltimore, MD: Author.