Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced this past Wednesday, October 19th, that it has developed a Taiwanese translation system, which lacks standardized writing, in what constitutes the first step in the design of a voice translation tool, automatic and in real-time, for all languages. “This technology allows those who speak Taiwanese to have conversations with people who speak English,” the Californian group said in a press release.
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 translation of languages will be possible,” the company said.
Taiwanese dialect
More than 30 million people speak Taiwanese, according to the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. Meta explained that this language, also called Taiwanese Hokkien, does not have a “standard writing system”, like “more than 40% of the approximately 7,000 living languages” in the world.
Artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to machine translation needs to ingest large amounts of written text to work. “Meta AI researchers faced many obstacles, from data collection, model design, and evaluation” of the results.
A universal translator
They used Mandarin as an intermediary 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 Taiwanese translation system within its future “universal translator” and make the computer code available to other AI researchers.
“The goal of Meta’s Universal Speech Translator (UST) project is to help break down barriers and bring people together wherever they are, including in the metaverse,” the statement added.
When Facebook was renamed Meta a year ago, its boss Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to become a metaverse company – a parallel universe accessed through a combination of virtual and augmented reality – considering that this is the future of the Internet.
