Communicating Culture

  • Authors:
  • Toru Ishida

  • Affiliations:
  • Kyoto University

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Intelligent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Nowadays, there's a new breed of globalization-different from the one spreading Coca Cola and Pokémon around the world. In our "small world," just as information moves across the globe, so do people. We see people with different cultural backgrounds learning to understand and enjoy the regional cultures they encounter.Consider, for example, sumo-Japanese traditional wrestling. People who appreciate sumo's excitement of sumo have increased in number regardless of where they live. In this way, the Japanese don't have to preserve the sumo tradition alone anymore. Similarly, people with various cultural backgrounds can preserve other regional indigenous cultural traditions.In such situations, the languages spoken vary. Although promoting English as a common language has its own role, taking the effort to understand other languages greatly helps in understanding culture. But, hundreds of languages are spoken around the world. It's simply too much to tackle this challenge all by ourselves. Will machine translation be helpful in this effort?This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI.