A NewScientist article discusses how pattern recognition software is being used to help us better understand the communications of animals, including a program that can automatically translate dolphin whistles (but only if the meaning is already known):
IT was late August 2013 and Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean. The dolphin pod she had been tracking for the past 25 years was playing around her boat. Suddenly, she heard one of them say, "Sargassum".
... She was wearing a prototype dolphin translator called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) and it had just translated a live dolphin whistle for the first time.
It detected a whistle for sargassum, or seaweed, which she and her team had invented to use when playing with the dolphin pod. They hoped the dolphins would adopt the whistles, which are easy to distinguish from their own natural whistles and they were not disappointed. When the computer picked up the sargassum whistle, Herzing heard her own recorded voice saying the word into her ear.
...
Herzing is quick to acknowledge potential problems with the sargassum whistle. It is just one instance and so far hasn't been repeated. Its audio profile looks different from the whistle they taught the dolphins it has the same shape but came in at a higher frequency. Brenda McCowan of the University of California, Davis, says her experience with dolphin vocalisations matches that observation.
Since the translatable vocalization has only been used once, it could be nothing more than a fluke, but if we can teach dolphins new vocalizations with a specific meaning and they actually use them, then we could finally understand each other enough to start gathering the data needed for real communication with a non-human species, which would be an incredible achievement (and might finally force people to accept the fact that humans really arent all that different from other animals).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bob The Cowboy on Thursday April 03 2014, @03:04AM
Er, she wasn't teaching the dolphins to say Sargassum, she was teaching the dolphins to associate a certain set of sounds with a common object in their environment (seaweed), Her translator device interpreted that set of sounds when made by the dolphins and *that* said in English, "Sargassum".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @03:23AM
Maybe she's running out of funding for her stupid crappy project.
If we are really smarter we should be learning their language(s) first not trying to teach them artificial languages.
Aren't linguists usually unhappy when some language goes extinct? So that's another reason to learn and document the dolphin languages first - whether they are very basic or not.