patentNumber: "US-IMP-3,447,772" title: "Universal Translator" titleRu: "Универсальный переводчик" filingDate: "January 18, 1962" issueDate: "November 11, 1966" inventor: "Sir Cecil P. Brougham, Bart." inventorRu: "сэр Сесил П. Бруэм, бт." inventorSlug: "cecil-brougham" classification: "Quantum Absurdities" status: "Theoretically Plausible by ~2200" abstract: "A wearable acoustic device for the bidirectional and instantaneous translation of any natural language, whether human or otherwise, into any other natural language, without the prior acquisition of bilingual training data or grammatical reference. The translator comprises an aural pickup (1) of single-crystal quartz construction, mounted upon a wireframe spectacle-like headset, an utterance-emitter (2) disposed at the wearer's larynx, a central reasoning module (3) housed within an enamelled lapel-pin, and a battery (4) of rechargeable type concealed within the heel of the wearer's shoe. The reasoning module is configured to extract semantic content from arbitrary acoustic input by means of a universal semantic decomposition (USD), and to re-synthesize the said content in the target language by reference to the wearer's stated preference." abstractRu: "Носимое акустическое устройство для двунаправленного и мгновенного перевода любого естественного языка, человеческого или иного, на любой другой естественный язык, без предварительного приобретения двуязычных обучающих данных или грамматического справочника. Переводчик состоит из ушного приёмника (1) из монокристаллического кварца, установленного на проволочной оправе наподобие очков, излучателя речи (2), накладываемого на гортань носителя, центрального аналитического модуля (3), размещённого в эмалированном лацканном значке, и аккумулятора (4) перезаряжаемого типа, скрытого в каблуке обуви носителя. Аналитический модуль конфигурирован для извлечения семантического содержания из произвольного акустического входа посредством универсальной семантической декомпозиции (USD) и для повторного синтеза указанного содержания на целевом языке по объявленному предпочтению носителя." citations:

• "US-IMP-3,144,902"
• "US-IMP-4,114,808"

Field of InventionОбласть изобретенияField of Invention

The present invention relates to apparatus for the real-time, bidirectional translation of natural language between a wearer and his interlocutors, without the wearer's prior study of his interlocutor's language and without recourse to a human intermediary. The invention is intended for application by diplomats, anthropologists, naval intelligence officers, missionaries, and tourists, and is particularly suited to the conveyance of first-contact greetings to interlocutors of hitherto-unknown linguistic provenance.

BackgroundПредпосылкиBackground

The translation of natural language between human speakers has been, since the construction of the Tower of Babel, the principal obstacle to international commerce, scholarship, and warfare. The conventional remedy — namely, the employment of a human interpreter fluent in both source and target language — is subject to the disadvantages that (a) the interpreter must himself have undergone protracted bilingual education; (b) the interpreter's fidelity to the source utterance cannot be independently verified; (c) the interpreter may have private interests at variance with those of his principal; and (d) the interpreter requires, in addition to his fee, accommodation, sustenance, and frequent rests.

The instant invention provides a mechanical alternative which is portable, faithful, and disinterested. The invention is distinguished from the prior art of mechanical translation (Weaver, 1949; Bar-Hillel, 1951) by its capacity to translate between languages with no prior bilingual training corpus, including languages of which the wearer's manufacturer has no prior record. The invention accordingly performs translation in the strong sense — that is, by the extraction of semantic content from the source utterance and the re-synthesis of that content in the target language — rather than in the weak sense of substitution upon a pre-compiled lexicon.

Summary of the InventionКраткое изложение изобретенияSummary of the Invention

The apparatus comprises:

• An aural pickup (1) of single-crystal quartz construction, mounted within a wireframe headset of conventional spectacle-like geometry, of sensitivity sufficient to resolve acoustic phonemes from the wearer's interlocutors at distances not exceeding three meters in ordinary conversational settings;
• An utterance-emitter (2) disposed at the wearer's larynx by means of an adhesive cervical patch, configured to bypass the wearer's vocal apparatus and produce, in the wearer's own voice and characteristic intonation, the translated equivalent of the wearer's intended utterance;
• A central reasoning module (3) housed within an enamelled lapel-pin of unobtrusive dimensions, comprising a colloidal preparation of artificial neural substrate in a sealed bakelite case and configured to extract semantic content from arbitrary acoustic input;
• A battery (4) of rechargeable lead-acid type, concealed within the heel of the wearer's shoe and providing approximately eight hours of operation per charge;
• A pair of electrical conductors (5), of fine silver wire, conveyed through the wearer's clothing from the lapel-pin to the larynx-patch and to the shoe-heel battery;
• A language-selection switch (6) mounted upon the underside of the lapel-pin, by which the wearer may indicate the desired target language of his utterances, the source language being inferred automatically by the reasoning module from the interlocutor's input.

U.S.B.I.P. Drawing №Чертёж У.С.Б.И.П. №U.S.B.I.P. Drawing №

Sheet 1 of 1Лист 1 из 1Sheet 1 of 1

Detailed DescriptionПодробное описаниеDetailed Description

Referring to FIG. 10A, the apparatus is shown as worn by a representative subject in the act of conversational exchange. The aural pickup (1) is mounted upon a wireframe headset of conventional spectacle-like construction, of which the temples extend backward over the wearer's ears in the customary fashion. The pickup itself is housed within the bridge of the spectacles, concealed in the appearance of an ornamental bead.

In operation, the wearer engages the apparatus by activating the language-selection switch (6) and by addressing an utterance in his own native language to his interlocutor. The aural pickup captures the wearer's utterance and conveys it via the conductors (5) to the central reasoning module (3) for analysis. Simultaneously, the pickup captures any utterance of the interlocutor and conveys it likewise to the module for analysis in the opposite direction.

The reasoning module performs upon each input utterance a universal semantic decomposition (USD), the precise mechanism of which is held by the inventor as a trade secret but which is, upon information and belief, an instance of the abstract syntax tree of the Chomsky hierarchy (1957) extended to incorporate semantic, pragmatic, and inferential content. The USD reduces the input utterance to a tuple of conceptual primitives drawn from a finite universal lexicon, this lexicon being asserted by the inventor to be common to all natural languages spoken by sentient beings.

The reduced tuple is thereupon presented to the re-synthesis sub-routine of the module, which retrieves from its memory the corresponding lexical and grammatical conventions of the target language and constructs an utterance in that language expressing the same conceptual primitives. The synthesized utterance is conveyed to the utterance-emitter (2) for production at the wearer's larynx.

The wearer experiences the production of the translated utterance as if it were his own, with the consequence that any conversational reference by him to the translator's operation is itself translated in real time and presented to the interlocutor in his own language. The wearer is accordingly able to converse with persons of unknown linguistic provenance without conscious effort of translation, and indeed without conscious awareness that translation is occurring.

ClaimsФормула изобретенияClaims

1. An apparatus for the real-time translation of natural language between a wearer and one or more interlocutors, comprising: an aural pickup configured to capture acoustic utterances within the wearer's vicinity; a central reasoning module configured to extract semantic content from said utterances; an utterance-emitter disposed at the wearer's larynx; a battery; and electrical conductors coupling said pickup, module, emitter, and battery.

2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein said reasoning module is configured to perform a universal semantic decomposition upon said utterances and to re-synthesize the said content in a target language selected by the wearer.

3. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein said utterance-emitter produces the translated utterance in the wearer's own voice and characteristic intonation.

4. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein said aural pickup is housed within the bridge of a wireframe spectacle-like headset.

5. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein said reasoning module is housed within an enamelled lapel-pin of unobtrusive dimensions.

6. The apparatus of claim 1, further comprising a language-selection switch mounted upon the underside of said lapel-pin.

7. A method for conversational exchange between a wearer and an interlocutor of unknown linguistic provenance, comprising the steps of: (a) donning the apparatus of claim 1; (b) selecting the target language by means of said language-selection switch; (c) addressing the interlocutor in the wearer's native language; and (d) attending to the interlocutor's reply in the wearer's native language as produced by said apparatus.

Why This Violates Physics (For Now)Почему это нарушает физику (пока)Why This Violates Physics (For Now)

The invention as claimed is held by the Bureau to be theoretically plausible by approximately 2200, the principal obstacles being not physical impossibilities in the strict sense but a confluence of computational and linguistic impossibilities of comparable severity.

First, the invention rests upon the proposition that there exists a universal lexicon of conceptual primitives common to all natural languages spoken by sentient beings. This proposition — the strong Whorfian-negation position — is the subject of vigorous dispute in contemporary linguistic philosophy, with proponents (Wierzbicka, 1972; Pinker, 1994) holding that such a lexicon may be reconstructed by the comparative analysis of human languages, and opponents (Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1956) holding that the conceptual content of an utterance is irreducibly tied to the linguistic structure in which it is expressed and cannot in general be conveyed in another. The Bureau notes that the experimental evidence weighs marginally in favor of the proponents for the case of human languages, but that the inventor's claim to cover all natural languages spoken by sentient beings, including languages of extraterrestrial provenance, extends beyond the empirical reach of the proponents' position.

Second, the invention encounters the problem of radical translation identified by Quine (1960), namely that no body of behavioral evidence determines the translation of an utterance from a hitherto-unknown language uniquely. The classical example — the field anthropologist confronted with a native who, upon seeing a rabbit, utters gavagai — admits at least three translations (the proposition "rabbit," the proposition "instance of rabbithood," and the proposition "undetached rabbit-part") which cannot be distinguished by any quantity of corresponding behavior. The reasoning module of claim 2 must therefore choose among empirically indistinguishable translations, and the Bureau is unable to certify the principle by which the choice is to be made.

Third, the invention rests upon the existence of a decidable algorithm for the extraction of semantic content from arbitrary syntactic input — that is, for the reduction of a finite acoustic signal to a tuple of conceptual primitives by mechanical means. The Bureau notes that the halting problem of computability theory (Turing, 1936) implies the non-existence of any decidable procedure for the analysis of arbitrary syntactic input, and that the reasoning module's universal semantic decomposition would, if it existed, constitute a counter-example. The Bureau is constrained to conclude that the reasoning module performs its function by some means other than decidable algorithm.

Fourth, the chain of causation by which the apparatus operates — from interlocutor's utterance, through the wearer's tympanic membrane, through the aural pickup, through the reasoning module, through the emitter, through the wearer's cervical patch, through the wearer's vocal apparatus, and finally to the wearer's auditory cortex — involves a propagation delay of approximately 300 milliseconds, this delay being incompatible with the wearer's subjective experience of synchronous conversation. The inventor's specification calls for the apparatus to anticipate the interlocutor's utterance by an interval corresponding to the propagation delay, by means of a predictive sub-routine of the reasoning module. The Bureau notes that such anticipation would constitute a violation of causality of the type considered in U.S.-IMP-3,091,447 and U.S.-IMP-3,887,201, and would render the apparatus impossible under all the same grounds. The Bureau is informed that the inventor regards this as a minor matter and is prepared to accept the 300-millisecond delay as a price of the translation.

The Bureau accordingly holds the invention to be theoretically plausible by approximately 2200, the principal advances required being (a) the resolution of the universal-primitives dispute in favor of the proponents; (b) a constructive evasion of Quine's indeterminacy; (c) a non-algorithmic mechanism for semantic decomposition; and (d) the wearer's resignation to the propagation delay. Citations: Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (1960); Chomsky, N., Syntactic Structures (1957); Wierzbicka, A., Semantic Primitives (1972); Turing, A., Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 42, 230 (1936).