A Google Translator Phone In Some Years?
[Google] is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly – like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years.
Google’s head of translation services, Franz Och, is quoted saying “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time ... Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”
Thanks for youe comment, Brian. You make some good points. I was writing from the point of view of a recently retired freelance translator, working from French into English. Although I think there will always be a need for competent human translators, I also think their role will gradually change to that of a glorified proof-reader.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea Esperanto with still around, to be honest. Leaving in Dubai, where so many cultures and social backgrounds interact, it is very clear to me that English is THE common language; some people may know only 10 words of it, but it still allows for some form of communication. I cannot imagine a Sri Lankan construction worker making himself understood in French, Spanich, or Esperanto. About mobile phones, I have yet to meet a Dubai expat, however poor, without one.
ReplyDeleteYes, I cannot see Esperanto ever catching on, despite its obvious merits. People have long predicted that its hour would come - but it never has!
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