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Hands on With the PSP Talkman Translator
PSP News writes "Lik Sang has a review and hands on of Sonys new Talkman accessory for the PSP, which enables translation of 4 of the worlds most spoken languages. From the article: 'Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you're not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft's speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean.'"
This has a lot of potential. Imagine not having to learn a language when moving your business into a new country, because all you have to do is carry your PSP around.
It probably doesn't work very well, but in a few years it'll probably be advanced enough for actual use.
Wow, is it possible I'll be able to understand the vendors at my local computer shows now? Eh, maybe not, Sony probably programmed it with DRM that "protects" whatever they're saying anyway.
Use a little common sense once in a while. --Book of Mooch Ch. 5 verse 14
Sannolikt alla dessa icke språkkunniga folken som strövar över vidderna därute.
it seems like a phrasebook with a large blue 3d bird.....
Monstar L
The top four are the following
1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
I'm not going to stick a PSP in my ear! Have you seen the size of it? I'm sticking to my fish, proven technology.
What's all that white goo coming out of CmdrTaco's anus?
Software solutions are great, but *be sure* to memorize (with your brain) "Where can I buy batteries?" in your target language...
wow, this could really cahnge the world and umm like stuff!
If it has a phone line plug, maybe we can use it for calling tech support?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Gokubi has arrived
English, Japanese, Chinese, that's ok, where is Korean one of the most spoken languages in the world?
Okay, seriously... how long until I have one to use when travelling to Q'onoS?
In their top demographic countries.
what is $sys$ in chinese?japanese? etc...?
sarchasm
I guess this isn't going to be as big a hit among the international business community as Sony might have hoped.
and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean
two make a couple
three make..mmm...err...more than a couple
Unless you are trying to say that Korea is a part of China or Japan!
--
Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?'
I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'
Sir George Bernard Shaw
The real Talkman. This should be interesting.
Great! Engrish for everybody! (At least judging from the spoken English skills of the average Japanese or Korean...)
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Captain Jean Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise!
I'm going to get one of these so I can go visit a cave and eat some butterflies.
... and stuff.
Wikipedia hints at English being number one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
in the far right with secondary speakers 150 - 1 billion.
English is obvioulsy the most taught secondary language, and that is set to only increase. There aren't any good exact stats on how widely taught it is.
do make the distinction that those numbers are only for native speakers.
those numbers for english don't even add up well when you consider that there are at least 4 english speaking countries I can think of, UK, US, Canada, and Australia. I believe there are three African countries that speak english nad then New Zealand but I'm not positive.
Those numbers ignore the millions of people in India nad China who learn english. In india, it is required to get into college(as they all are taught in english).
The full scope and scale of this technology in the years to come. I'm a first year chinese student at Vassar College, with the full intention of becoming fluent - will learning a second language become useless and a waste of time when this technology improves to such a point that people will be able to speak quickly and naturally in their native tongue and have everyone else understand them with the help of a simple computer?
The day people will regret the Talkman existing is the day that someone takes it and attempt to translate anime with it.
Hell that might actually be pretty funny...
One more reason for people to go extinct :) - The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement http://www.vhemt.org/
actually really simple.
It's nothing more than a DVD or Xvid file with subtitles and two PCs.
You take one PC with the subtitles or the audio in your native tongue and another in the language you're trying to learn. As you go through the movie, re-type the subtitles in the target language repeating the spoken phrases in the target language. The re-typing and reciting part is to drill it into your head since just watching the movie tends to leave you forgetting everything a minute later. If you have the discipline to sit down and do it, this is a really fast technique and you're working with complete sentences is context with body language so it really helps you remember phrases in context rather than vocabulary which is practically useless by itself.
You could do the same thing with two DVD players and two TVs, but I find the controls on a PC are much easier to work with for the constant back and forth it requires and I think the re-typing part is essential so you need at least one PC anyway and of course a keyboard with the target language keyboard layout. If your target is Chinese, you can get fonts with phonetic symbols for your subtitles that will allow you to key in the characters even if you don't know the pronunciation. All those things are available on a Debian system.
However, although this technique rocks, I think the only way to really learn a foreign language is to get a lover who speaks that language. Almost every English native speaker I know who has learned spoken Chinese well has taken this path and it's definitely the way to go. I took classes for years and could hardly open my mouth, much less be understood. But after a year of living with a Chinese girlfriend it became second nature without even trying. Of course you risk ending up married and living in China, but that's not as bad as it sounds.
Some time ago I worked for IBM, they came out with an application that had you talk into a microphone and it would type what you said. A bunch of us sat around one afternoon trying to get it to type negative things about IBM, it wouldn't. I actually have some level of trust of IBM, after the recent mis-adventures of the Sony Corporation I would not trust them to translate a rest room sign for me.
From the article:
Deconstructing Talk Mode: MAX is at a loss
We are a bit shy to admit: after our early successes, we went overboard. Boy, what new gadgets can do to you! Creating a quick brainstorm session in our tech chamber, we tried to come up with questions that one person from the English speaking realm possibly might want to ask when visiting the Japanese videogame store Eldorado, famous Tokyo district: Akihabara. Here are some Talkman results for rather geeky questions that may or may not have been asked before in Japan's ultimate games Mecca:
- Question: "My little brother took my first-edition white Saturn for a dive when showering, can you advise on where I could get replacement parts?"
- Talkman results (Shopping): From "Where should I go to pick it up?" to "Where can I find a florist?"
- Question: "As for the rumor of a Scottish checkered edition of Pokemon for NeoGeo Pocket Color existing, can you confirm and would you have stock?"
- Talkman results (Shopping): From "Do you have this in a lighter color?" to "It's a little flashy for me."
- Question: "My wireless Commodore64 controller interferes with my neighbour's newly bought lawnmower vehicle, can he sue me for every time his brakes fail?"
- Talkman results (Meeting People): From "That was gross!" to "What a surprise!"
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
That *would* be funny if not for the fact that the PSP uses rechargeable lithium ion batteries. So asking where to buy batteries at is not going to help to.
Korean is listed as one of the world's top four spoken languages, but this is very false. With only 70 million native speakers, do you really think that there are enough people who have studied Korean to push it up to the top four? I don't think so, myself.
It ill be complete only if it can help Hungarians in London. ;-)
Thomas
Note that it says "4 of the worlds most spoken languages", not "the world's 4 most spoken languages". I don't know about the other 3 languages but it looks like your English could use some work!
Okay, queue the ST "Universal Translator" jokes.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Hehehe everybody forgets the Kiwis! (New Zealand)
Are they the languages that most media that actually reaches across globally is in? Are they the most anything? Maybe it doesn't have to do with how many speak those languages but how much commerce or media are widely available or ubiquitous in those languages?
I'd say that the Phraselator folks have little to be worried about because the PDA-type interface - although clunky for games - seems well suited to finding what you desire to communicate. The talking duck seems like it's both inflexible to new modules and could get annoying really, really fast.
The greater issue is that while these devices smooth your ability to *communicate your desires*, I've found in my experience that an ability to *understand others* is more sorely needed. It's easy to make the appropriate expression/point to what you want.
It would be best if someone could develop a device you could hold up or take a picture of text. Then you would push the "Translate" button and get results. A neat feature would be the "literal translation" or "nouns/verbs only mode". That way you would be able to get the gist of what someone is yelling at you instead of allowing the machine to go down crazy logic paths.
Not quite.
Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't understand those from the north.
Also, the population of Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the U.K. is > 322,000,000 and while you could subtract the minorities in the U.S. and Canada that don't speak English, you're still missing the 300,000,000+ in India who speak English. Throw in all the other places where English is known, to some usable degree, as a secondary language and you're probably looking at 750,000,000+ speakers.
It is also, along with Spanish and French, one of the most widely dispersed languages in the world. There may be a ton of Bengali speakers, but I'll be 95% of them are in the Bengal region of North-Eastern India and the surrounding area.
And then consider this is a Sony Japan product. Their market -- East Asia -- deals mostly in (surprise) East Asian languages and English.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
that everything human beings need to know was created on Star Trek. Remember the Universal Translator they carried with them.
Yeah, Chinese dialects are probably the world's most fragmented. While the written language is a standard, the spoken language is nuts. There are around 10,000 dialects in Chinese, and about 3 or 4 major dialects (mandarin, etc.).
English is becoming very popular in Asia just as a bridge language. Chinese may not be able to speak to Taiwanese or Hong Kong people, but if everyone knows a little English, they can get by (and do business with Europe, consequently).
Except that barely half of the population in China actually speaks Mandarin, and even then, most of those that speak it speak so so as a second language. The written language is much more pervasive. http://english.people.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103 _169500.html
The relevant sections:
"Mandarin's status as China's standard language has been further enhanced as nearly 53 percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese in the country can communicate with others via Mandarin, said a national survey released here Sunday."
And most still speak in their local dialect instead:
"The survey also shows 86 percent of the population can speak regional Chinese dialects, and nearly 5 percent use the languages of China's 55 ethnic minority groups to communicate."
Even then, the numbers might be higher than reality: I suspect it is easier to interview people in the cities than those in the countryside :)
good post. but can't help levitizing here...
>>Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't understand those from the north.
I worked for a company that employeed several California engineers. They could all read the same newspaper. Those from the north couldn't understand those from the south.
Well I bet someone makes alot of money today lsaid=# is the affiliate variable in that link which is on the front page of slashdot.
Why read and get involved in a meme when it just makes you unhappy?
I find Engrish funny.
I find http://hanzismatter.com/ funny.
I find it funny when the Tick could only speak high school French.
I find it funny that the only words of Spanish Beavis knows are "Burrito" and "Spaghetti".
I guess I find language jokes funny. If that includes Engrish, then so be it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yeah, the different Chinese languages are "dialects" of each other like Spanish is a dialect of French. The only reason many Chinese like to call them "dialects" is the nationalist "One China" propaganda.
Not to mention that Australian "English" and American "English" are sufficiently different that misunderstandings can occur. Vowel sounds, word meanings, word choice, and phrase pitch are all somewhat different. I learned this the hard way the first time I went from my home in the US to "down under". They could understand me just fine (lots of exposure to American television), but I would sometimes have to ask them to repeat or explain things.
Mandarin 885 million
English 470 million
Hindi 418 million
Spanish 362 million
Top four for all speakers, not just natives. I'm not sure why the Chinese is listed as Mandarin when there are so many different dialects.
source: http://www.nicemice.net/amc/tmp/lang-pop.var
I wonder how well this really works. For example, babel fish has trouble with the translation of some text which is for the most part exact information. But throw in audio and try to translate it? I think we have quite a way to go in order to make this a viable product. But then again, I could be wrong
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill
And to think there was a time when Spanish and French were called "Vulgar Latin".
Actually, written language has fragmented into two: traditional and simplified. In cold-war parlance, traditional characters were used by "Free Chinese", while simplified were used by "Godless Red Communists". Those raised and educated on traditional characters find the simplified ones very "strange", and vice versa. I was in China a few times but couldn't make out 1/2 of of the words there. Some I guessed at the meaning between recognized characters, but other I had to ask my Chinese colleague for help. Most western students of Chinese prefer simplified because it's "simpler". But to us, the simplified characters has lost most of their connotative meaning.
True, but you cannot extrapolate too much from your anecdote. Even by conservative estimates, the Mandarin dialect accounts for 800 million+ almost-native speakers. Your experience is colored by the fact that Cantonese is especially overrepresented in California. If you take a random Chinese person in China (or even Asia), there's a high probability that he or she understands Mandarin. It's true that the probability is much lower if you take a sample from the Chinese in the US, but there are over a billion Chinese in China and only a few million in the US. While there are indeed a lot of different and mutually incomprehensible (spoken) local variants of Chinese, in the larger scheme only two count: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin was the local dialect of the area around Beijing, and later adapted by the government as the official national language of China (both the People's Republic (PRC) and Taiwan). In absolute numbers, it is by far the most important. In the PRC, although most regions and provinces have their own dialect used in daily life, the language used on TV and school is Mandarin. This may sound like Mandarin is a second language to the local dialect for most Chinese, but it's more like a "second native" language, as 1) all courses starting from elementary school are completely in Mandarin regardless of the local dialect, and 2) the script is the same as the local dialect. Thus, the majority of Chinese from Taiwan or the PRC will speak Mandarin (in addition to their own local dialect).
Cantonese is the native dialect around Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, in the south. It's less important then Mandarin, but overrepresented the West (especially California and in the UK). Its importance is due to two factors: 1) a large proportion of early Chinese emmigrants came from the Guangdong (so many later emmigrants even from other provinces learned it as it was the language of the established community) and 2) it's the native language of the economic powerhouse Hong Kong. Most younger people from HK speak Mandarin pretty decently nowadays, but not as well as those from the PRC, since (AFAIK) courses in HK schools are still taught in Cantonese, and Mandarin is indeed a second language. However, many older Chinese emmigrants in the US and their descendents only understand Cantonese.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This sounds like a really simple version of the Universal Translator..so when do I get mine in my combadge so I can understand spoken Klingon and Romulan?
> Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese
> engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk
> to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't
> understand those from the north.
All people in China are taught Mandarin these days, even in the south (where a student will grow up learning both Cantonese and Mandarin now).
Many Cantonese speakers will pick up Mandarin. My fiancee moved from Hong Kong around 6th grade (pre-changeover so no Mandarin in school), and learned Mandarin in AMERICA, simply from talking with other Mandarin speakers. Pretty amazing, but it only took her a year or so, and she can converse fluently in Mandarin.
Hence a Mandarin translator is about all you need, insofar as the new generation of Chinese go, especially if you are dealing with mainland China. A Cantonese one would be nice, but you'll get much better coverage with Mandarin.
I think you're exaggerating.
Mangez vers le haut de Martha
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Well then, good news! It's a suppository.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Are you sure it's not already on my computer?
few things convey sincerity on the international stage like putting in the effort to be able to say a few words in the language of your host. I can't see a mechanical translator having the same effect.
I suspect the same is true of romantic endeavours, but hey, this is slashdot.
..don't panic
I'm thinking that those 4 languages are the ones spoken most predominately in asia, or at least parts of asia near japan... once you cut out the rest of the world it makes a lot more sense.
it's still useful, even if it's more useful to people interested in asian language or traveling to asia than to people in the rest of the world.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
My friend Wu is an international student from Hong Kong, and he was able to talk to random international students from all over China just fine.
I think the only way to really learn a foreign language is to get a lover who speaks that language.
Yeah, that's really useful advice to give on Slashdot, thanks....
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
If you go by useful languages (most people speak fluently), I would rate it as:
I don't want to buy this record, it is scratched.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Nintendo already made a game titled 'Hey You, Pikachu!' Features: * Fully interactive voice recognition * Mount microphone onto your controller * Tell Pikachu what to do * Play games with Pikachu * Collect items and "friend" points http://ign64.ign.com/articles/153/153734p1.html
http://row1.info
melhor tomar cuidado, amigo. Parece que estão fazendo mod negativo em brasileiros que sabem mais inglês que americano! Engraçado como ele ganhou +1 Interesting.
you'd better take care, my friend. Looks like they're modding down brazilians who know English better than americans.
My other account has mod points.
Mr. X told me that Italian and Spanish are in fact the same.