Star Bringing Down the Language Barrier - Automatically
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
In the News One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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RE[4]: What's the problem?
by sbergman27 on Sat 3rd May 2008 15:25 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: What's the problem?"
sbergman27
Member since:
2005-07-24

It would take decades, maybe a century of active teaching and other work throughout the EU before enough people would speak the language fluently,

You dropped your credibility right there. It takes a hundred years to learn a language? Gee, what are we sub-centenarians to do? Mime?

While English is haphazard and irregular enough that it could conceivably take a century to master, languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are easy to pick up. It's all the many exceptions and irregularities in a language that are hard to learn.

A good natural language is like a good programming language. It makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. English makes easy things hard and hard things nearly impossible. And every time someone new takes on the task of learning it, yet more wasted effort is incurred memorizing huge collections of irregular verb conjugations, lists of irregular plurals, etc. Do you double the final consonant before adding this suffix to that word? How about this root and that suffix? 'I' before 'E'? Oh, that's unless it's after a 'C'... except here, here, and here, where it's not.

And all that so that they can "communicate" in a language which is inherently more prone to facilitating miscommunication. A language in which the word 'beg' has become its own antonym.

I am a native English speaker. And even I cannot recommend expanded use of that language. And I can only assume that anyone who does has loosed their mind.

Edited 2008-05-03 15:27 UTC

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