• Question: Is it possible to make a machine that can translate what animals are saying?

    Asked by Flori to Angela, Claire, Ian, Robert, Sarah on 16 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Angela Stokes

      Angela Stokes answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      Hi Flori
      That would be fun wouldn’t it! I don’t know whether a machine will be possible, but some animals already tell us things in their own way – cats run around your feet when they want affection, or more likely food; dogs bark as either a warning or to get attention and elephants in the wild paw the ground and put their heads down before charging. I am sure there are many more examples.

    • Photo: Sarah Harris

      Sarah Harris answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      I’m not sure about this; animals don’t communicate in the same way as us so having a translation machine that uses human language as a standard is unlikely. A lot of animal communication is through body language, which we can already make some sense of.

      Although as I’m typing this another wild theory has come to mind. Neuroscientists and neuroengineers are currently researching ways of translating the brains electrical signals into language, so that people with locked-in syndrome (for example) could communicate just by thinking about what they wanted to say. If we take this research far into the future then maybe one day we could do a similar thing with animals. Possibly? It’s a bit of a woolly theory though so I wouldn’t pin your hopes on it!

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