Introduced its artificial intelligence-assisted technology, which can instantly translate the Hokkien language into English. The technology developed by Meta and called the intelligent translation system brought to mind the Universal Translator device in the Star Trek movie.
Hokkien is known as a Southern Min language native to the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the southeastern part of Fujian in China. Used by more than 45 million people in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, Hokkien is among the spoken languages without a standard written system. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a video promoting the language translation technology in a Facebook post.
Meta has developed an artificial intelligence supported intelligent translation system
In the developed project, it was announced that NLP (natural language processing) technique was used, as in other artificial intelligence supported translation applications. The NLP method, in which texts are trained with artificial intelligence, can be improved by supporting it with extra sentences and words.
The low number of professional translators who know the Hokkien language and the very few recorded data translated into English increase the importance of Hokkien in artificial intelligence applications. Considering that it is actively used by millions of people, languages like Hokkien can reach more people today thanks to artificial intelligence.
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“Although the Hokkien translation model is still a work in progress and can only translate one full sentence at a time, it is a step towards a future where simultaneous translation between languages is possible. The techniques we pioneered can be extended to many other written and unwritten languages.” statements are included.
Meta used written Mandarin as an intermediary between English and Hokkien while training the AI application to overcome the language barrier issue. “Our team first translated English or Hokkien speech to Mandarin text, then translated it to Hokkien or English – both with human annotations and automatically,” said meta researcher Juan Pino. They then added matched sentences to the data used to train the AI model.” said.
The company also highlighted that they are working with Hokkien speakers to check the translations. However, the models, data and research developed by Meta are open sourced for other researchers to use.