Walking down the halls of the building that houses OGJ and its sister publications, we might overhear an advertising sales representative for Oil & Gas Journal Latinoamerica taking an order from a Brazilian client in Portuguese or an editor carrying on a phone conversation in French. I have heard our production editor speaking in Latvian and a drilling editor getting information about a Russian drilling project—in that language. An assistant from Transylvania, I'm told, speaks Hungarian and Romanian. Our job application even asks which languages applicants speak fluently.
Although college degrees in the US require the study of a second language, the country as a whole speaks only one: American English—in various accents. Consequently, most of us find that the other languages we learned have atrophied from disuse, which is unfortunate.
Monolinguistic troubles
The disadvantage of being a monolinguistic nation in general causes problems when we range abroad, as often we are wont to do. Journalists, especially, need to know enough of a country's language to perform their jobs, hence the advantage on the job application of speaking other languages.
Accelerated language courses are one solution, but they are limited in scope and take time.
There are also paraphernalia, available for years, that can help travelers convert money and phrase books that give simple helpful sentences in various languages if one must venture forth to a country whose language is not among those in which he is fluent. The problem, of course, is that knowing the question is only half of the solution; you also must be able to understand the answer, which frequently is not in the little phrase book. The same is true for hand-held phrase translators.
Those simple items pale, however, compared with the new computerized language translators that scientists are now developing and that the US military is examining—devices that might be helpful to anyone who must communicate quickly and accurately in a language in which he is unfamiliar. Armies tend to find themselves in that situation frequently, as do journalists—and oil industry personnel. Inventions are fast approaching to meet the need.
Enter James Bond
Intelligence technology continues to proliferate at a steady pace. Universities are working with the military, private industry, and law enforcement entities to develop more-effective automated translators.
One $2,000 hand-held machine, the "Phraselator," can translate 200,000 recorded commands and questions (from English) into 30 languages, including Chinese, Russian, and Arabic, but it doesn't understand the answers either, so questions must be couched so that the answer can be "Yes" or "No" or answered by pointing. That might be helpful if army personnel want to command, "Get out of the car!" or "Put your hands up." Or enable a doctor or chaplain to ask, "Where does it hurt?" But it may have limited applications for journalists and oilmen.
However, there already are briefcase-sized scanners that can translate documents, and Carnegie Mellon University has developed a device for Lockheed Martin that can convert speech back and forth between languages—thought to be the only known apparatus with that capability.
The instrument, an audio voice translation guide system called Tongues, enables the user to speak into a phone handset plugged into the device and have his words translated into the particular language du jour for which it has been programmed. Then the individual with whom the user is communicating could speak into the phone and it would translate his comments into English, all using a speech synthesizer.
Lockheed tested the device in Croatia in April 2001 for Army chaplains who wanted to talk to dying patients. They also demonstrated what a soldier might want to know, asking if there were any snipers in the area. The device translated into Serbo-Croatian, and the chaplains could distinctly hear the words "snai-perr." They then tested the result by converting the Serbo-Croatian back into English and it replied, "Are there any sniper?"
Close enough.
This device, while bound to be outside the budget of the average journalist, appears to hold much promise for those of us who find that we often need to visit many countries and converse with its citizens yet haven't the time to learn every language.
Although gadgets with ideal capabilities may take "decades" to develop, the experts say, the encouraging thing is that they are working on them.
And the day may even come—far in the future, I'm sure—when it may be unnecessary to ask journalists applying for a job which languages he or she speaks fluently.
