Language Preservation 2.0: Crowdsourcing Oral Language Documentation using Mobile Devices

语言保存2.0：使用移动设备众包口语文档

• 批准号: 1160639
• 负责人: Mark Liberman
• 金额: $ 10.15万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-07-01 至 2014-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1160639&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Language; Preservation; 2.0; Crowdsourcing; Oral

Language Preservation 2.0The purpose of this pilot project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a new approach to documenting endangered languages.To allow wide-ranging investigation of a language even after it is no longer spoken, we need the equivalent of the million words of extant biblical Hebrew texts, or the five million words of extant classical Latin. But for endangered languages without a significant culture of literacy, diverse text collections on this scale seem out of reach. Given typical speaking rates of about 10,000 word-equivalents per hour, a hundred hours of recorded speech -- conversations, narratives, or oral histories -- would give us the equivalent of a million words of text. With community involvement, hundreds of hours of such recordings are easily within reach.However, transcribing such large audio collections is a daunting task, given the small number of literate native speakers and the time-consuming nature of such transcription, which can take 200 hours of work for every hour of audio. We propose to solve this problem by substituting re-speaking and verbal translation: one or more native speakers repeats each phrase of a recording, speaking slowly and carefully, and then translates it into a better-documented language.The utility of translated passages as a way to analyze otherwise-unknown languages has been demonstrated many times, starting with the Rosetta Stone. This aspect of our task is easier, since at least a grammatical sketch will in general be available. Our goal in this project is to demonstrate the utility of re-speaking. We believe that linguists, starting out with relatively little knowledge of a language, can produce phonetic transcriptions that will be good enough to support subsequent analysis resulting in coherent texts, in a process analogous to (but easier than) the process that allowed previous generations of scholars to learn to read ancient Egyptian or Sumerian.

语言保存2.0这项试验计划的目的是证明一种记录濒危语言的新方法的可行性。为了对一种语言进行广泛的研究，即使它不再被使用，我们需要相当于现存圣经希伯来语文本的百万单词，或者现存古典拉丁语的五百万单词。但对于没有重要文化素养的濒危语言，如此大规模的多样化文本收集似乎是遥不可及的。考虑到典型的每小时约1万个单词的说话速度，100小时的录音——对话、叙述或口述历史——将给我们提供相当于100万单词的文本。在社区的参与下，数百小时的这样的录音很容易就能得到。然而，转录如此庞大的音频集合是一项艰巨的任务，因为有文化的母语人士数量很少，而且这种转录的耗时性质，每小时的音频可能需要200小时的工作。我们建议通过复述和口头翻译来解决这个问题：一个或多个以英语为母语的人重复录音中的每个短语，慢慢地、仔细地说，然后把它翻译成一种有更好记录的语言。从罗塞塔石碑开始，翻译段落作为一种分析未知语言的方法已经被证明了很多次。这方面的任务比较容易，因为通常至少会有一个语法草图。我们在这个项目中的目标是演示重新说话的效用。我们相信，语言学家在对一种语言的了解相对较少的情况下，可以产生足够好的语音转录，以支持随后的分析，从而产生连贯的文本，其过程类似于（但比）允许前几代学者学习阅读古埃及语或苏美尔语的过程。