TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A Taiwanese engineer’s wish to tear down language barriers for his father has completed an impressive feat－the development of the world’s first Hokkien-English translation service by Meta.

Meta, formerly the Facebook company, on Wednesday (Oct. 19) revealed its latest tech venture, an AI-enabled translation service for Hokkien, an unwritten language spoken by about 49 million people in countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and China.

Chen Peng-jen (陳鵬仁), the Taiwanese AI researcher behind the project, said his father, a retired factory technician, speaks Taiwanese Hokkien primarily and sometimes finds it tricky to converse in Mandarin. He hopes Meta’s initiative to develop a Universal Speech Translator will allow millions of people like his father to better communicate with others.

The development of the Hokkien-English translation system has been daunting, Meta said in a blog, as AI translation system is based on training through large quantities of text. The lack of a formal writing system and paired speech data makes it difficult to train the model.

Researchers have had to work with Hokkien speakers by translating English or Hokkien speech to Mandarin text before translating it to Hokkien or English, said Meta.

Buoyed by the initial success of the project, Meta eyes expanding the system to other unwritten languages with the objective of granting people “the ability to communicate with anyone in any language.” For Chen, the service is meant to express his love to his family. “I just want my father to be able to speak to whomever he wants,” he said.

(3/3) By open-sourcing our benchmark data to the AI community and including our Hokkien system in a UST, we hope other researchers will build on this work. Someday all languages, written or unwritten, may no longer be an obstacle to mutual understanding. https://t.co/7yxdWEa2ln pic.twitter.com/yUZ2P8biT0

— Meta AI (@MetaAI) October 19, 2022