Meta (Facebook, Instagram), announced on Tuesday, October 18, that it had developed a translation system for Hokkien, a Chinese dialect whose writing is not standardized; a first step in the social media giant’s project to design a real-time, automatic voice translation tool for all languages.
“This technology allows people who speak Hokkien to have conversations with people who speak English,” the Californian group said in a press release.
There are not enough written texts for current technologies
The software is not finished, and at this stage it only allows one sentence to be translated at a time, but “it is a first step towards a future where simultaneous language translation will be possible,” says the company.
Hokkien is a language used primarily in southeastern China and Taiwan. Meta specifies that it is spoken by 28 million Chinese and 13.5 million Taiwanese. The group explains that this language does not have a “standard writing system”, like “more than 40% of the approximately 7,000 living languages” in the world.
However, current artificial intelligence (AI) technologies dedicated to machine translation need to ingest large amounts of written text to work.
The use of Mandarin as an intermediate language
“Meta AI researchers faced many obstacles, from data collection, model design, and evaluation” of the results, the statement noted.
They used Mandarin as an intermediate language, to establish correspondences and then have their system translate directly orally, without going through the written word.
The US group plans to use its Hokkien translation system within its future “universal translator” and make this computer code available to other AI researchers.
When Facebook changed its name to Meta a year ago, its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, said he wanted to become a metaverse company, which he sees as the future of the Internet, consisting of a parallel universe, accessible through a combination of virtual and augmented reality.
Source: BFM TV
