25. Hello, World

Imagine a machine that speaks your language—and translates it for those who don't.

When President Clinton said enthusiastically in his final State of the Union message that "soon, researchers will bring us devices that can translate foreign languages as fast as you can speak," no one asked to see the prototypes.

So where are they? Do such automated-translating machines exist? When can we expect to pull out our cell phones, call a Paris restaurant to make a reservation, and, speaking English, impress the head waiter with a perfect Parisian accent? How soon is "soon"?

Clinton isn't the first to be seduced by a vision of Star Trek's Universal Translator brought down to Earth. The dream of translation by computer is older than the high tech industry itself. Before email, before word processing, before command-line interfaces, machine translation—or MT—was one of the first two computer applications designed to act upon words instead of numbers (the other was code breaking). By 1959, MT had already become a thriving field of commercial and academic research.

But it turns out that really good MT is so hard to pull off that the task exhausted the top-end computing resources of every generation attempting it. Regardless, machine translation R&D is going stronger than ever, fired up by the globalization of the Net. Today, all over the world, software designers, programmers, hardware engineers, neural-network experts, AI specialists, linguists, and cognitive scientists are enlisted in the effort to teach computers how to port words and ideas from language to language. The future of our networked world depends on it.

Many experts believe that instantaneous MT will arrive in less than 10 years, as humans coevolve with the technology and adapt to its inherent weaknesses. Others are convinced that only sweeping breakthroughs in computer architecture will turn our PCs and PDAs into Universal Translators. In the meantime—thanks to innovations in speech recognition products like Dragon Systems' Naturally Speaking, even better MT technologies, and continuing R&D at places like AT&T and Carnegie Mellon University—we are inching closer to the kind of seamless MT that was first envisioned nearly half a century ago.

Since then, one thing has become certain: A Net that doesn't speak English as its default language is coming soon, and machine translation will be one of the best ways to deal with multilingual overload—if we can make it work.