A Universal Translator By Any Other Name…

Without the Universal Translator (UT) we wouldn’t be celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek next year. Who wants to watch a TV show where people can’t communicate with one another and can’t figure out what they have in common? You might as well watch family Thanksgiving dinner videos.

Kirk and the Gorn captain were made to “fight it out” by the Metrons. 
Settle your differences man to alien was a big deal on the original 
series. The Gorn were reptile like, and they had similar technology to 
Federation. Notice the silver cylinders, each character has a universal
translator. The Gorn have also been spotted on The Big Bang Theory, 
so their territory is growing.

As a story telling convention, the UT allowed for near instantaneous communication between species that had never met before. With the communication problem solved, the story could move on to conflict resolution and figuring which female alien Kirk was going to kiss.

In the Original Series, the UT was a silver cylinder; you can see the Gorn and Kirk with them in the clip. By The Next Generation, they were incorporated into "com badges." In one episode, Riker and Counselor Troi had them as implants. The Ferengi had them in their ear, an apparently Quark’s had to be adjusted with a Phillips screwdriver every once in a while – although that may have been to remove ear wax.

Humans have about 6000 spoken languages on Earth as of March, 2015 – 6001 if you want to include rap. We're in quite the hurry to build translators that would help us understand one another - anything to avoid years of high school classes that lead to stronger brains but also bad foreign names and poor attempts at cooking.

In some ways, our translators have already passed those of Star Trek, but in others ways we're far behind. Most of our problems have to do with understanding just what things all languages have in common and what things are purely cultural, contextual, and completely without precedent. Let’s take a look at our efforts so far.

If you watched Star Trek, you may already realize the way we have surpassed some of their technology. The UTs of Kirk and Picard were for spoken language only. They still had to keep a crew member as a translator to figure out what signs meant on another ship or how to interpret alien consoles. We already have that licked.

Romulan text is supposedly related in visual character to Vulcan. 
One- someone studies this stuff? Two – I like the color scheme. If 
you came across this screen on a ship’s console, you’d know

it was important – the optical character reader/ translator in Word Lens 
would come in handy here. Three – I find it hard to believe there 
isn’t a Romulan font package you can buy at the App store.

Optical character readers have come a long way in the past few years. We now have cameras and software that can view written words in one language and automatically project them on the screen as translations in another language.

Google has one (Google Goggles, now Google Translate for Android), and there’s an app for that on the iPhone/iPad (called Word Lens, from Quest Visual, bought by Google Translate in 2014, see video below).

And of course we have translators for written words – you type in what you want to say, and the software gives you a reasonable (meh) translation. Try translating a phrase in and out of a language several times and see what you end up with – it’s like a multicultural game of telephone operator.

The latest amazements are the vocal translators, but only for languages we have programmed in. Skype translator was introduced in late 2014. You speak in Spanish or English while having a video chat. On the other end, it comes out in English or Spanish. Why? Because that’s the only translation they offer as of now. How? It's based on speech recognition software. It also gives you a written transcript of the conversation so you can post all the hilarious errors on Twitter (like for autocorrect).

It’s in the vocal translation arena that the Star Trek UT excelled. It was so good it that the TV series just accepted that the translator was there, never broke down, and let us hear everything in English. They didn’t even bother making the aliens’ lips (if they had them) move out of synch with the English translation!

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by one

of Napoleon’s soldiers. It was a decree from 196

BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top is the

decree in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle

is the same decree in Demotic script, and the

bottom is the decree in ancient Greek. Having the

same text in three languages allowed us to decipher

hieroglyphics for the first time.

Most importantly, the Star Trek UT had one feature that none of ours currently do. It could decipher and translate languages that had never been encountered before – like rap.

In principal, the Federation members would have their new alien acquaintances talk into the translator for a while. The device, using deciphering algorithms and the linguacode matrix (invented by an Enterprise linguist), would learn it and then translate it. This seems hinky to me.

Every time a new word was encountered, it would seem to me that the translator would have to either wait till it heard it enough times to decipher its meaning or extrapolate its meaning from context. Neither of these things could occur in real time. It seems to me that the “talk into it” phase would be very long.

Basically, the hardware of a translator is easy. It’s the software that we have to work on. A 2012 paper presented to the Association for Computational Linguistics (yep, just call ‘em the UT geeks) used statistical models to try and train language programs better.

Up to this point in time, vocabulary has been the choke point in trying to speed deciphering and translation. By using the statistical commonalities of all languages (if they can be found and relied upon), the need for so much vocabulary would be eased.

Any of these real-life software algorithms (or the fictional linguacode matrix) will be based on ideas presented in the 1950’s by American linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky and others.

Noam Chomsky was born in 1928, and he hasn’t

been quiet since. He isn’t boisterous by any means,

but he has an opinion he’s willing to debate you on

for just about everything. Linguistics is his game, but

woe is the person who believes he only knows the

structure of language – many a debating opponent

has skewered by his blunt, and ungilded prose/speech. 

Chomsky put forth the hypothesis that all languages had universal similarities. He claims the existence of a biologic faculty in all organisms of high brain function that exists for innate language production and use; basically he’s saying the language is genetic. With this approach, it should be possible to write software that could break any language into these similar patterns and then decipher it.

Ostensibly, the more languages that were encountered, the better the UT would work. On the other hand, maybe there’s not a biologic universality to language, but word order is mimicked in all language – how we build a language is universal.

Either one of these scenarios would make it easier for a computer program to take a completely unknown language and put it through algorithms that might discern order and then meaning.

But a recent study is inconsistent with these ideas. According to a 2011 paper in Nature, word order is based more on historical context within a language family than in some universal constant or similarity. They found that many different sentence part combinations, like verb-object (or object-verb) or preposition-noun (or the reverse) for example, are influenced by other structure pairs within the sentence.

One word preceding the other in some languages caused a reversal in other pairs, while the reverse might be true in other language families.  The way that sentence structure via word ordering evolved does not follow an inevitable course – languages aren’t that predictable. Bad news for computer-based word order help.

In 2600 BCE the Indus valley civilization had a

population of over 5 million. Cities have been

excavated and impressive art has been found. The

tile above shows a rhino, polka-dotted at that,

apparently with polish on its toenails. The symbols

above may be a written language. It’s a big deal which

language it might be related to, since Pakistan and

India are still fighting over this region.

It’s a roller coaster ride trying to figure out if computer power is going to solve our UT problems. We were at a low point with the paper above, but in 2009 we got some speed over a hill. In the 2009 paper, a computer algorithm to predict conditional entropy was used in an effort to investigate a 5000 year old dead language.

The Indus civilization was the largest and most advanced group in the 3000 BCE world. Located in the border region of today’s India and Pakistan, they may have had a written language – we can’t tell. They had pictograph carvings, but what they mean is up in the air. There is no Rosetta stone like we found for ancient Egyptian, and no one speaks or reads the Indus now.

The algorithm for conditional entropy is used to calculate the randomness in a sequence of…. well, anything. Here they wanted to see if there was structure in the markings and drawings. The results suggested that the sequences were most like those in natural languages.

But, just to prove it’s never that simple, linguist Richard Sproat (works for Google now) has contended that the symbols are non-linguistic. In 2014, he did his own larger analysis with several different kinds of non-linguistic symbols, and showed that the Indus pictographs fall into the non-linguistic category.

He rightly points out that computational analyses have a downfall in that biases could enter based on what type of text is selected and what that text depicts. I don’t think someone could pick up English if all they had to study were shopping lists.

But in other old languages, more progress has been made. One paper used a computer program to decipher and translate ancient language of Ugaritic in just a few hours. They made several assumptions, the biggest one being that it had a known language family (Hebrew in this case). This may not be possible when dealing for the first time with some new alien language.

Picard and Captain Dathon of the Tamarians had to

come to some meeting of the minds in order to survive

the beast on El-Adrel IV. He spoke only in metaphor, a

fact that Picard is slow to pick up on. Me - I just wonder

how Dathon didn’t drown when it rained. By the way, you

can get a T-shirt with just about any of Dathon’s sayings.
image credit - It's All About: Star Trek

They also assumed that the word order and alphabet usage frequencies would be very similar between the lost language and Hebrew. They then played these assumptions off one another until they came upon a translation. Ugaritic was deciphered by brute human force a while back, but it took many people many years to do it. This is how we know that the computer algorithm got it right – it just took 1/1000 of the time.

But, even if we find universalities in language, the computer won’t be enough. An example comes from Star Trek itself, in an episode of ST:TNG called Darmok. The universal translator told Picard exactly what the aliens were saying, but it didn’t make any sense.

Their language was based on their folklore and history. All their phrases were metaphors of events in their past. So unless the UT knew this species’ particular history, it could only translate the words not the meaning. Language is more than words in an order; language is the collective mind of a group connecting them to each other and to their world.

Next week, deflector shields.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Sproat, R. (2014). A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems Language, 90 (2), 457-481 DOI: 10.1353/lan.2014.0031

Dunn, M., Greenhill, S., Levinson, S., & Gray, R. (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals Nature, 473 (7345), 79-82 DOI: 10.1038/nature09923

Rao, R., Yadav, N., Vahia, M., Joglekar, H., Adhikari, R., & Mahadevan, I. (2009). Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script Science, 324 (5931), 1165-1165 DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391

Snyder, Benjamin, Regina Barzilay and Kevin Knight (2010). A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2010

Tough Talking Apes

Science vs. Hollywood is always good for a laugh, but it's often a chance to learn some very interesting tidbits as well. Today, let’s take on the talking apes of the new movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Sure, the apes with whom Charlton Heston discussed Baconian philosophy over a nice plate of bananas were capable of talking. They had been afforded many generations of possible evolution. But Dawn takes place only 10 years after the previous film, when Cesar and his cohorts escaped to live in the woods.

Cesar speaks in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. This is

amazing and impossible. But what may be worse – he’s a

face painter! He would fit in at a hockey game or a

Seinfeld episode.

Is it possible that they could learn speech within one decade? Are apes just not trying right now? The grand question would be, why is it that humans are the only animals that use spoken language to communicate?

To begin to answer our questions, one first must decide what a language is. Linguists have four criteria for sounds to be a language. One, each vocalization has a certain order – the short "i" sound always precedes the "en" sound in the word “in.” Second, there must be an order to vocalizations – this is syntax. Third, the vocalizations cannot be tied to or defined by a specific emotional state – you can yell the word “Hey,” either to let someone know a bus is driving at them, or to say hi a friend you meet for coffee. And fourth, novel vocalizations are understood – you can say something that has never been said before, but those people listening to you will understand its meaning.

If sounds follow those four rules, then they’re an oral language. So humans have spoken language and other animals don't - although the majority of people don’t use the gift very well. But the question remains, why are humans so much better at making sounds and language than primates? We share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, but they can make only three dozen or so vocalizations. Humans can make hundreds of different sounds – every noise required for every language on Earth. Where did we separate from apes in terms of vocalization?

Current hypotheses focus on two areas; brain molecular biology and body anatomy.  Let’s focus on the anatomy – we can make more vocalizations because of how our throats and chests have evolved.

The hyoid is the only human bone that is attached

to only muscles, not to another bone. Our hyoid is attached to 

tongue muscles, throat muscles, and jaw muscles. They all

work together to help us produce thousands of vocalizations.

To make sounds, you must be able to expel air in a controlled manner, this requires rib muscles and innervation to allow controlled exhalation – we got it, apes don’t. The air that is expelled passes over the vocal folds and vibrates them – this produces sound waves. The wave that is produced is based on the way your muscles change the shape of the vocal fold cartilage, and one way to alter the laryngeal muscle tone and shape is by moving your tongue.

The tongue is a muscle, and ours goes further back in our throat as compared to that of apes. Theirs is housed completely within their mouth, but we can change the shape of our voice box by using our tongue. You can stick out your tongue and move it side to side and feel your Adam’s apple move. Your adam's apple is NOT the same thing as your hyoid bone; the adam's apple is the laryngeal prominence associated with your voice box, but you can see that moving your tongue can modulate the vocal folds.

The other characteristic of the tongue that makes a difference is that it is our most sensitive touch appendage. We can make small and discrete moves with the tongue, and sense where it is in relation to our teeth and cheeks. This is another reason we can make so many different sounds, and is also why babies put everything in their mouths.

Another anatomical difference is that humans have a free-floating hyoid bone; it is the only bone in the human body that is not anchored to another bone. By attaching to the pharyngeal and tongue muscles, our hyoid helps us to make more than hoots and grunts. While apes do have a hyoid bone, it is not located as deep in their throat as is ours. In fact, infant (human) larynx and hyoid bone anatomy looks a lot like ape anatomy, but as we grow, our voice box and hyoid bone descend in our throat, while those of the apes do not. This is one reason it takes babies a while to learn to speak, muscle tone being another.

The intercostal muscles between the ribs are arranged

in several diagonal layers. The external muscles help with

inspiration, while the internal intercostals help with forced

exhalation. Humans have much more innervation of these

muscles (see the nerve traveling with the artery and vein in

Fig. B), so we can control exhalation for vocalization. It is

said that the human thoracic nerves allow for as much

control as the innervation of the hand and fingers.

Your rib muscles, your tongue attachment and your hyoid bone are all good reasons why humans can make more vocalizations as compared to nonhuman animals, but our brains matter too. The shear size of our brain means that we can devote more neurons to abstract thought, assigning meanings to vocalizations – this is the basis of a large dynamic language. But there is a molecular issue as well.

The Foxp2 protein is involved in vocalization and in understanding language. In songbirds with a mutated foxp2, their song is incomplete and inaccurate. In humans, defects in foxp2 activity lead to severe language impairments in both speaking and in understanding. Two small mutations in the human foxp2 are much of what separates our language ability from that of the apes.

A 2014 commentary takes the idea of bird song further, hypothesizing that human speech evolution was a reawakening of avian constructs in the basal ganglia of the brain, with the “tinkering” afforded by time, pressure, and mutation.

Terrence McKenna put forth a wild hypothesis in his 1992

book, Food of the Gods. His “stoned ape” theory stated that

early primates used psychedelic mushrooms to expand their

consciousness and that this led to fast evolution and

development of speech. If we follow this hypothesis, then just

what was growing in the woods where Cesar and his ape

mates have been living for the last 10 years?

Cesar of the Apes movies was genetically modified for intelligence, so maybe he had the foxp2 necessary to grasp speech. But do you think part of his genetic modification was to alter his ribs, hyoid, mouth, and tongue? The foxp2 does work in vocal fold, soft palate and tongue function, but it doesn't move your hyoid around!

If not, then maybe he understands our language, but he won’t be speaking it. And what about his cohorts? They speak too, although nobody played molecular hanky panky with them. And all this takes place within the lives of this single generation! The 1968 movie had time on its side, the evolution through generations was at least plausible. (but why did they speak English?)

For the new movie, it isn't evolution they so, it isn’t even evolution on steroids. The talking apes toss out Darwin completely and smell of Lamarckian evolution meets the Hulk (see this post). Come on Hollywood, give us a little credit – if you want us to buy in to a world we recognize, then stick to the natural laws we know.


Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
As Many Exceptions As Rules 



Ackermann H, Hage SR, & Ziegler W (2014). Brain mechanisms of acoustic communication in humans and nonhuman primates: An evolutionary perspective. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 1-84 PMID: 24827156