New Alcatel-Lucent technology from Bell Labs enables Instant Translation

2nd February 2012 - Commercial enterprises with growing mobile workforces, humanitarian organisations, Governments, web-delivered international conferences – almost every organisation now has a need to communicate across languages. And with the rise in globalisation leading to the development of an increasingly mobile workforce, combined with the need for instant communication, we are becoming even more of a global village.

The need for instant communication between people speaking different languages is becoming critical. Manish Sablok, Head of Marketing, North Europe, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, identifies the key challenges to achieving effective global communication, and demonstrates how a new development from Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent is overcoming these issues.

Worldwide there are more than 6,000 languages and almost all translation is done by human effort. Today there are an estimated 400,000 translators worldwide with some 150,000 - nearly 40% - working within Europe with its diversity of languages. To understand the translation problem, don’t just look at the number of languages to be translated, think of the ‘directions’ of translations – French to German and German to French. So the 6,000 languages worldwide becomes 36,000,000 language directions to be translated!

The Challenges

Thanks to the rapid increase of global communications there is a gap developing between the rapid development of human exchanges and the ability to provide immediate translated information. The huge brigade of highly skilled translators will just not be able to meet the demand for information to be immediately available in a language each of us understands as their mother tongue.

There are many challenges in the translation process, from lexical and grammatical differences to variations in local dialects and environments, to the detail of the product or service being discussed. Typically, enterprises that need to communicate globally have employed specially trained linguists who become the single point of call for employees wishing to contact people in a particular country. Or they use a telephone interpretation service.

The Solution

Bell Labs, the distinguished research and development arm of Alcatel-Lucent with a history of developing revolutionary technologies from the transistor to Unix, has an answer in its most recent development: the Instant Language Voice Translation (ILVT) solution.

Tony Guez, Application Business Development Director, Alcatel-Lucent France, here explains how this universal language translation service is provided through telephones and the Internet: "As one person begins a conversation in English, the service translates the dialogue in real-time, so that the person on the other end of the phone – say in Spain – hears a version of that dialogue in their native tongue in real-time. The system also produces an instant text output of the dialogue which could be viewed on the screen of the telephone."
"And we also offer a conference call mode: I say "Hello", Roberto hears "Ciao", a few seconds later Joules hears "Bonjour" and José hears "Ola" – all in the same conversation, all at the same time and each accompanied by instant text on his own screen. Roberto was on a smart phone, Joules was using VOIP, and José was on his landline."

ILVT is the first and a unique solution to provide long-distance communication translation over any phone whether it is a web phone, mobile or fixed, based on the server network, to provide a powerful solution with a high rate of voice recognition and top translation quality.

Tony Guez continues: "The quality and accuracy of the recognition and translation is over 90%, due to the fact that the ILVT solution provides instant voice translation capability that combines the quality of the existing communications network with a knowledge database held on the organisations’ owned servers. This allows the ILVT solution to be easily customised to address situation-specific or industry-specific situations. So whether you are a manufacturing company addressing a new market across the globe, or an IT company looking to expand across Asia, the language can be optimised for your individual situation by including industry-specific vocabulary."

The Impact on cultural understanding between a global workforce

In the case of a business expanding globally, with no interpreters needed to translate for each language, ILVT would empower a greater number of employees to communicate between their counterparts in foreign countries rather than rely on specially trained – and often expensive – multilingual staff, whose skill is translation, not their business.

By providing greater ease in terms of effective communication, this new generation of instant automated translation facilities would make it much easier for businesses to operate across the globe. By allowing people to work more directly together it could also lead to tremendous growth in cultural understanding.