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Portable Translator Devices?
Roger Binns asks: "I've been looking for an electronic language translator device (like a
personal organiser form factor) that can do English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Unfortunately, they are extremely difficult to find on the Web, and the ones I have seen at airports are very expensive and tend to only do one non-English language." Cool idea. Where can one buy something like this? If I ever get the time to go to Europe, I would love to take along something like this. The potential for such a device is staggering.
Every fly-by-night electronics store in New York (and doubtless other immagrant meccas like L.A.) sells no-name handheld translation gadgets. Typically they only do a word (cheap) or sentence ($200 or so) at a time, not whole passages. You can get them with one language or with a bunch at once. Some have speech synthesis.
If you have a Palm handheld with a fair amount of RAM (8MB), there are a fair number of translation dictionaries out there. They're all one-word-at-a-time, though, so one of the better dedicated handheld gadgets will serve you better.
Or, as long as you stay in North America (whoops! not so good for travel!) you could get a Palm VII or get a Palm III or V with a snap-on wireless modem and use the GO Network translator, for which there is a query app that handles the usual 4 or 5 European languages.
OOG STEAL TRANSLATOR FROM COMPANY, SO OOG SEE IF SPANISH WORK ON TRANSLATOR THROUGH TESTING VIA SLASHDOT POSTING:
OOG ESCRIBE ESTE PÁRRAFO EN ESPAÑOL!!! A OOG LE GUSTA APLASTAR LAS CABEZAS CON LOS DISCOS COMPACTOS DE FUENTE ABIERTA!!! A OOG TAMBIÉN LE GUSTA FUMAR LA MARIGUANA DE CUEVA, BEBIR LA CERVEZA DE CUEVA, Y CHINGAR A LAS MUJERES DE CUEVA!!! OOG COME MUCHAS CABEZAS DE LOS PECES!!! PERO LA PERSONAS QUE A OOG NO LE GUSTAN SON TODOS LOS ÁRBITROS QUE NO ENTENDEN A OOG Y JUZGAN QUE LOS PÁRRAFOS DE OOG SON EXAGERADO (PORQUE NO TIENEN UN RAZÓN BIEN PARA SU MODERANDO MAL!!!) SI OOG JAMÁS ENCONTRA A UN DE LOS ÁRBITROS MALES, OOG LE DARÍA UN GOLPE EN EL CULO!!!
OOG HAVE SUCCESS!!! TRANSLATOR WORK WELL FOR OOG!!! AND NO ACCUSE OOG OF USING BABELFISH, OOG ACTUALLY HAVE SENSE!!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
My Spanish-English dictionary of choice -- I am practically in love with it-- is _The Oxford Spanish Dictionary_ (1994). Why do I adore it so? It is nearly 2000 pages of Spanish/English goodness, including >275,000 words/phrases, >450,000 translations, verb tables (every single verb in the dictionary is matched to a particular conjugation pattern found at the back of the book), aid with correspondence, weights and measures conversions, and lots of other helpful features.
My favorite thing about this dictionary, however, is its inclusion of regional idioms and slang. Spanish varies markedly between countries, and this dictionary includes a tremendous number of those regional distinctions. For example, "chamaco" is a Mexican word meaning "boy" or "kid"... Though it is found only in the vocabulary of one Spanish-speaking country, it is included in the dictionary with the annotation "(Méx fam)," indicating that it is a familiar (as opposed to formal) Mexican expression. The same is done for regionalisms of Central America, the Caribbean, the Southern Cone, Spain, and all the other Spanish-speaking countries/regions.
As you can see, I could go on all day about this, but I will spare you...
The _Oxford_ dictionary definitely has French, Italian, German, and Russian counterparts, which I imagine are equally comprehensive. I'd be willing to wager they also offer comparable dictionaries in other languages. (Try looking here.) The dictionaries run somewhere in the vicinity of $45, and they are well worth the price.
I have yet to find a truly comprehensive Brazilian Portuguese or Hebrew dictionary, but, then, I haven't really looked very hard. If anyone knows of one, let me know. (You can use heidipom@hotmail.com for now, as I will be switching ISPs shortly.)
I hope that from this long-winded explanation you were able to derive some substantial content. :)
heidi
http://www.franklin.com, Before I go to far let me tell you I work for Franklin . I'm the guy responsible for the software in the entire pocket translator product line, I wrote it. Not the dictionaries, I've done a number of them but so have many others.
No, I'm not the linguist who does the language stuff - they won't let me do that, they know better then that, I just do the prodcut software, simulation tools, compilers, assemblers and stuff like that.
There are two classes of products, the shirt pocket '106' series. We also make quite a number of larger full DICTIONARY products.
The translator product lines sell here in the states for $14.95 to $29.95 depending on the number of languages, and the store you purchase them in, and the feature set included.
The rip-off shops in NYC charge 200 to 300% over MSRP - check out our web site.
They all include FONETIK spell korekshun, no other pocket translator series has the depth of features the franklins have, nor the word grouping we have.
For instance, try these things in any product: mikerowscope, noledge, phish, kawfee, backtearia, nive, see who can actually find the word you are looking for.
Yes, we do have some competitors, they are Seiko-Epson, and Hachette and to some degree Langenshite (German outfit). Somebody mentioned LINO - they don't make anything - they just sell stuff that is done by a Taiwan out fit.
The TWE106 has Eng/Ger/Frn/Spn/Itl, the TEE-106 (only available in europe) has English, German, Hungarian, Polish and Czech. The TEP-100 (Don't know if they are still around) has English-Portuguese. Some of the other products DLE/FLE/NLE-100 or -106 include Dutch, and/or Swedish. These small credit card sized guys include a small databank (50 to 100 names & phone numbers depending on size). And a simple calculator.
The TRE-400 has 7 languages and a few more features.
In heavily inflected languages, the inflections work the way you want, and would expect. English example: if you type "GO" the product knows how to find the word "WENT" also.
The dictionaries typically include inflection screens showing word usage in simple sentences like: I run, You Run, I have Run, I ran, etc, in most cases, this is in both languages.
Our translators - unlike the other junk ones that are out there know that a "BOOT" is the trunk of a car in [UK], and stop and ask do you want BOOT (AUTO) [UK] or BOOT (SHOE) [US] don't translate it only as a shoe or a trunk. They also know that TRUNK in (US) can mean (AUTO) or TRUNK (LARGE SUITCASE).
Most of the German products (all translators, most dictionaries) understand compound words, ie: German, an airplane Boarding Card is boardkarte or something like that.
The full dictionary type products are available in quite a number of languages, ie: Bi-Lingual Dictionaries and a few mono-linguals included
Languages include: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Sweedish, Catalan, Polish, Czech, Arabic, Hebrew, just to name a few. The primary european languages are available in the US, the others - well you have to get them from the local countries. See http://www.franklin.com/international
We also have some of the best indexable text compression on the planet - that's how we can do this work.
The little tiny pocket $15 to $30 translators are run by a 1MHZ 6502 with 2 or 3K bytes of ram and about 512K bytes of rom, and a little 2032 coin cell battery.
The larger units run on a custom 24 bit RISC cpu that we developed in house, we have GCC & GDB ported for this custom RISC cpu.
One thing to keep in mind when you are looking for these types of products, Franklin is the only company in the world who Designs and Develops the products *IN*HOUSE* in all aspects, ie: Hardware, Software, Compression, circuit boards you name it. Everybody else farms the work out, it shows in the product quality that you purchase.
Well, they are both using Systran software... so I don't see how one could work better than the other...
Methinks Disney's may be using a newer version of Systran software than the version used in .
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe in 10 years.
For now I would be happy with a Sharp Zauraus, thus a kind of super Palm Pilot, where I can use a stylus to draw a Kanji character I see on its screen and it applies pattern recognition and gives a lookup from a built in dictionary. It exists in Japan, but I have no clue where to buy it in Germany.
One useful item that they didn't include is the part of speech. Then you know that the noun run is not the same as the verb run.
Also the tiny keypad makes the entry inconvienent. You can't keep a conversation going, if you have to keep using this device.
Fight Spammers!
If I give the translation system the text "Pick up the lead." it doesn't know if I mean a cable, or a base metal.
The second problem is that words which are equvilant in one language are not neccessarily the same in other languages. For example in english, a book can either be a printed work, or a ledger of business transactions.
A third problem is that phrases generally do not translate. If you translate the phrase "Throw the book at him" directly into a non english language, you may well get something which has translated perfectly, but is understood totally differently.
None of these problems are totally unsolvable, but they need a good NLP in order for the computer to truely understand the text before attempting to translate it.
Well, babelfish.altavista.com works pretty well, for a website at least.(even though your looking for more of an organizer type thing). The problem I've found when using these is that they are too literal, exact translations.
one that translated klingon!
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
I knew a boy from Taiwan who came over here maybe 8 years ago, and he had a device that had an integrated TI-81, currency converter, TaiwaneseEnglish dictionary, etc., etc.
A quick search should turn up some results, though; I found Lingo easily enough.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
CPen (http://www.cpen.com) is very portable and very cool. It is big as a highlight pen and you scan a word in the same manner as you would with a highlighter. It comes with one dictionary but you can buy them also. It also beams text to and from PalmPilots and Laptops using IR. Also contains an address book.
I main gripe of translate are the accurate of information it give. I first one bad translate did but now I having much betterer one. It had translate this one and it do good!
Serious, some person complaining too much about translate but I am seeing none problems. It look goodly to I.
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
I was just talking about this yesterday. A good palm pilot with web access and a bookmark for babelfish.altavista.com should do the trick.
Problem is that if you don't use the language (or rather: written language in this case) regulary, you forget. And one is usually very seldom opposed to that language in Germany.
It is interesting to see Japanese folks who live here to use a kanji dictionary when they write a post card. So they suffer the same.
Also, little subtlies of the language get lost, for example translating "you" into French, do you use "vous" (you, formal reference, used for people you either don't know or people you should show respect to) or "tu" (you, informal reference, like you'd use for your buddy).
However, if both parties know the machine is translating, and accept the ungrammatical output and work around it, machine translation sure can help.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Found it... Here's one for 25 bucks that can do phrases in Spanish, French, German, and Italian: http://www.franklin.com/estore/de tails.asp?ID=23
Imagine this. You take some voice recognition software (ViaVoice perhaps) and put it into a Palm-size recorder. When the language comes in, it processes it through a translator, either a program or even something rudimentary, like Babelfish. Automatic language detection would be kind of tough, but you could easily tell it what language to expect by the country that you are in. I don't see why all of this can't be done with a Palm-size device and a wireless connection.
Yes, your translations would be rough, but they'd get the job done. I've translated entire articles using Babelfish for research and the main ideas come across. I don't see why something like this can't exist right now.
There are plenty of translator programs available for the Palm platform nowadays, and the investment in Palm hardware is better than in a dedicated translator machine.
Check all the usual Palm websites (I don't know 'em off the top of my head), and you'll see what I mean.
Palms are the veritable sonic screwdriver of computing. Just pick up a cheap one, buy the translator software, and leave it at that.
(Might I suggest a Visor? http://www.handspring.com/)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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Point 1: Not there yet
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Even the best Machine Translation (MT) systems are only useful for what are referred to as "gyst" translations. The makers of the leading systems concede this. One (Transparent Language) says:
"If you are going to disseminate your translation to others, you usually want a human translator to at least look it over and edit it, as in our PersonalPlus translation service level on PlusTranslation.com. If you are going to print or publish your translation, you definitely want the translation done by a competent human translator who has experience in that particular domain..."
Another interesting commentary on this is provided by the president of the American Translator Association, in a letter to President Clinton:
Letter to Clinton
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Point 2: There's a better way
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The top level systems have extremely large databases (of vocabularies, morphologies, idioms and grammar patterns) and are not currently practical for handheld devices.
A much better solution is using your handheld to connect to other people--people who speak the required langauges--and getting translations from intelligent human beings.
We're working on this.
Henry
ProZ.com