Things to come in translation
Google Translator: The Universal Language:
The Google Babelfish
This would be the most advanced implementation of the Google Translator. It would be a smart device you plug-in to your ear, and it would have speech recognition and Auto-translation built in. You can now visit a foreign country and understand people who talk to you in languages you never learned.
Few years ago, I would have considered the prospect described in that interesting brainstorming article plain bullshit. No longer. In the span of a few days, I was contacted by some unknown US entrepreneur asking if I was available to help with a short translation. I forgot I had once advertised free test translation on my business web site. But reminded of that fact, I offered to do it just like that, for free. The content was a mail exchange between the client and a Japanese partner. As the US side of the conversation was missing, reading the Japanese part only was a small challenge, not for the vocabulary, but for trying and understand the context. But it did not take much time to come up with something possibly meaningful. I am not expecting that entrepreneur to come back with further work, paid this time. It was free lunch that I offered and he ate for free, which is fine. However, in his thank you message, he told me with apparent relieve that he had been so far relying on Internet machine translation to conduct business with Japan, and the conversation this time sounded a totally different and new story.
You can bet it. But in a of a few years, I believe machine translation will make that kind of mail based exchange feasible with enough accuracy to not rely anymore on human translation. I am not suggesting that it will be perfect and applicable in any case. But it will be rather correct and fairly usable in many case.
In the same trend, I just received a contact from a Japanese company offering phone and video conference based interpretation services. They are looking for people available to work from home at any time time. It seems they are offering among other services the renting of cellphone with interpretation to allow travelers abroad to get in touch with an interpret whenever needed. I would indeed be curious to see how it works in the real world. And with still some idle time spent in front of the computer, why not just let's do it? At least before the Google Babelfish gets into the picture for real.
The Google Babelfish
This would be the most advanced implementation of the Google Translator. It would be a smart device you plug-in to your ear, and it would have speech recognition and Auto-translation built in. You can now visit a foreign country and understand people who talk to you in languages you never learned.
Few years ago, I would have considered the prospect described in that interesting brainstorming article plain bullshit. No longer. In the span of a few days, I was contacted by some unknown US entrepreneur asking if I was available to help with a short translation. I forgot I had once advertised free test translation on my business web site. But reminded of that fact, I offered to do it just like that, for free. The content was a mail exchange between the client and a Japanese partner. As the US side of the conversation was missing, reading the Japanese part only was a small challenge, not for the vocabulary, but for trying and understand the context. But it did not take much time to come up with something possibly meaningful. I am not expecting that entrepreneur to come back with further work, paid this time. It was free lunch that I offered and he ate for free, which is fine. However, in his thank you message, he told me with apparent relieve that he had been so far relying on Internet machine translation to conduct business with Japan, and the conversation this time sounded a totally different and new story.
You can bet it. But in a of a few years, I believe machine translation will make that kind of mail based exchange feasible with enough accuracy to not rely anymore on human translation. I am not suggesting that it will be perfect and applicable in any case. But it will be rather correct and fairly usable in many case.
In the same trend, I just received a contact from a Japanese company offering phone and video conference based interpretation services. They are looking for people available to work from home at any time time. It seems they are offering among other services the renting of cellphone with interpretation to allow travelers abroad to get in touch with an interpret whenever needed. I would indeed be curious to see how it works in the real world. And with still some idle time spent in front of the computer, why not just let's do it? At least before the Google Babelfish gets into the picture for real.
posted by Lionel Dersot at
5/23/2005 08:52:00 AM
