Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has announced an ambitious new AI research project to create translation software that works for “everyone in the world”. The project was announced as part of an event focusing on the wide range of benefits Meta believes AI can offer the company’s metaverse plans.
“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language – that’s a superpower that people have dreamed of forever, and AI will deliver that in our lifetimes,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an online presentation.
The company says that although commonly spoken languages such as English, Mandarin and Spanish are well treated by current translators, about 20 percent of the world’s population does not speak languages covered by these systems. Often, these under-served languages do not have easily accessible written text bodies that are needed to train AI systems or sometimes do not have a standardized writing system at all.
Meta says it wants to overcome these challenges by deploying new machine learning techniques in two specific areas. The first focus, called No Language Left Behind, will focus on building AI models that can learn to translate a language using fewer training examples. The second, Universal Speech Translator, aims to build systems that directly translate speech in real time from one language to another without the need for a written component to serve as a mediator (a common technique for many translation apps).
In blog post announcing the news, Meta researchers did not offer a deadline to complete these projects or even a roadmap for major milestones to reach their goal. Instead, the company emphasized the utopian possibilities of universal language translation.
“Removing language barriers would be profound, enabling billions of people to access information online in their native or preferred language,” they write. “Advances in [machine translation] not only will it help those people who do not speak one of the languages that dominate the internet today; they will also fundamentally change the way people in the world interconnect and share ideas. “
Basically, Meta also anticipates that such technology would greatly benefit its global products – increasing their reach and making them essential communication tools for millions. The blog post notes that universal translation software would be a deadly app for future portable devices like AR glasses (which Meta builds) and would also break boundaries in “immersive” VR and AR real-world spaces (which Meta also builds). In other words, while developing universal translation tools can have humanitarian benefits, it also makes good business sense for a company like Meta.
It is true that advances in machine learning in recent years have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of machine translation. A number of major technology companies, from Google to Apple, are now offering users free AI translators, used for work and tourism, and are certainly providing countless benefits around the world. But the underlying technology has its problems as well, with critics pointing to that machine translation there are no critical nuances for human speakers, injections sexual bias into its products, and is able to throw them out strange, unexpected mistakes only a computer can. Some speakers of unusual languages also say they are afraid losing his speech and culture if the ability to translate their words is controlled only by great technology.
Considering such errors is critical when mass platforms like Facebook and Instagram apply such translations automatically. Consider, for example, a case from 2017 when a Palestinian was arrested by Israeli police after the machine translation software on Facebook mistranslated a post he shared. The man wrote “good morning” in Arabic, but Facebook translated it as “hurt them” in English and “attack them” in Hebrew.
And while Meta has long aspired to global access, the company’s own products remain biased to countries that provide most of its revenue. Internal documents released as part of the Facebook Papers revealed how the company struggles to moderate hate speech and abuse in languages other than English. These blind spots can have incredibly deadly consequences, such as when the company failed to address misinformation and hate speech in Myanmar before the Rohingya genocide. And similar cases involving dubious translations occupies the Facebook Supervisory Board to this day.
So while a universal translator is an incredible aspirant, Meta will have to prove not only that its technology is equal to the task but that, as a company, it can apply its research fairly.