JodyByrne.com
It seems that despite the 10-point plan outlined in the last issue to raise the profile of translators and interpreters we’re all doomed! Those clever eggs at HewlettPackard have come up with something that could conceivably see translation becoming a thing of the past, something to be looked back on fondly and studied in much the same way as scholars study Sanskrit. How you might ask? Well, what do you get if you cross English, Japanese and Esperanto? You get a hybrid, manufactured language called Computer Pidgin Language, CPL for short.
Tired and frustrated at the apparent lack of progress being made in the field of voice recognition, the boffins at HP Laboratories Bristol decided that rather than trying to bend computers to the will of their masters, it would make much more sense to get humans to adapt to the capabilities of computers. They examined various different languages – both natural and artificial – to see where computers scored best at voice recognition and where they ran into problems. Taking those phonemes from each language which computers found easiest to “understand” they transposed these rudimentary sounds onto an entirely new lexical and grammatical framework to form the basis for a new, albeit simple language which computers could understand with a great deal of reliability and which humans could learn with minimum effort.
According to the HP white paper which describes CPL, “This is a radical new approach to dealing with the problem of humans talking to computers. The new approach is to teach people a new language that is efficient for dialogues with computers – a sort of artificial spoken language. They go on to say that CPL could conceivably become a cyber-latin or lingua franca of the Internet.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Well it is until you hear what it sounds like. Printer becomes “crinter” while telephone becomes “teleter”. Some expressions are particularly easy for computers to understand and these can be given any meaning you want. So you can say “balka”, “coupo”, “obobify” or “okilimox” and mean practically anything you want. In designing CPL, the researchers were keen to make it as simple as possible. With this in mind they decided that:
- Only one diphthong is allowed per word. Diphthongs are: ‘ey’, ‘ay’, ‘oy’, ‘ow’, ‘aw’.
- Short vowels are not allowed at the end of words. Short vowels are ‘aa’, ‘ao’, ‘ih’, ‘eh’, ‘ae’, ‘ah’, ‘uh’ and ‘aw’.
- The phones zh and th are not used
- The phone ng is not a valid starting consonant.
- The phones r, y and w are not allowed either side of a diphthong.
- The phone hh is not allowed as a second consonant.
With a limited vocabulary and simplified pronunciation rules, it shouldn’t be too hard to learn CPL. But kids and teenagers will apparently find it the easiest to learn. Now it’s bad enough that they listen to manufactured music but now they’ll all be speaking a manufactured language and us old fogies over the age of 20 will need interpreters to understand them when they speak to us. That’s if they even bother speaking to us. I mean, if we don’t speak CPL we’re obviously nowhere near cool enough to merit our existence being acknowledged by them.
What’s more, if CPL does become the language of the Internet, will we still need to localise websites? What if CPL breaks out of cyberspace and makes it into the real world? Could we see the end of natural languages and of translation as we know it? Probably not. But then again, stranger things have happened. More than likely it will be the kids who speak CPL. So maybe the future isn’t so bleak for translators and interpreters after all. Admittedly, the landscape for translation could change radically with everything being translated into or out of CPL but parents will always need to talk to their kids. One thing is for certain, though, if this does catch on it won’t matter how coupo kids may find it, it’ll be a pain in the okilimox for the rest of us!
