Imagining the world without the language barrier

I recall many films in which using a language is a matter of downloading. In such world, ideas from anyone can flourish with their originality.

Although the invention of any language was for effective communication, the Inter(net driven)-globalisation caused clash of languages. A beautiful thought expressed in minority languages may lose their way to the global stage due to the language barrier. For example, I have decided to write this article in English than my mother tongue. The strategic choice is to approach more audience by English.

If you imagine that you write something in your best language then it is automatically available in other languages for global people's best understanding of the contents. That is why I am so excited with the recent development of the machine translation and I am proud to be a part of the developing community.

For research, I have chatted with many multilingual people and also language learners. The multilingual tend to learn some grammar and basic vocabulary then move into witnessing more language pairs to figure out the linguistics of the target language. It is very similar to how the neural network learns a new pair of languages and I believe we are heading the right direction. Of course, the machine still can only learn what is available in data form so we need to feed additional types of data than the language pairs.

To test the current level of the translation by the machine, I have tried to have a conversation in a no-idea language relying on a machine translator. The very basic level with a few words did make good sense. So the initial conversation was possible. Then adding more complex sentences into the conversation was a still daunting task in a completely new language. Both of the people in the conversation were not sure whether the messages they wrote were correctly understood by the other person. There may be better translators available than the ones I used. It is a sound start of the conversation by a machine translator.

With the current pace in the development in the field, I imagine my dream world is not a far distance. Until then we may have to learn a new language or wait for the moment we speak the same language or by digital images transmission from one brain to another.

The end of my first attempt in this new SNS world.