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.'"

Comments

My ears!!

[simp]

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.

all i gotta say is...

[God'sDuck]

Software solutions are great, but *be sure* to memorize (with your brain) "Where can I buy batteries?" in your target language...

Re:Vem behöver dessa?

[tpgp]

Swedish:

Sannolikt alla dessa icke språkkunniga folken som strövar över vidderna därute.

Translation from the talkman:

My hovercraft is full of eels.

I wonder how it would translate...

[xfletch]

"Hello sir, I can't be bothered to learn your language so would you mind speaking to the badly animated sesame street character on my portable gaming device?"

I guess this isn't going to be as big a hit among the international business community as Sony might have hoped.

Re:Engrish

[dancingmad]

And how much Japanese or Korean do you know?

This stupid meme pisses me off to no end. I'm here in Japan and frankly the Japanese speak far better English than we (generally) do Japanese, and we're students learning Japanese. Yes, a lot of Japanese speak poor or no English, but very, very few Americans speak another language; further speak a non-Romance or Germanic language with any real skill. Yes, English study in high school is a joke. But on the whole, the Japanese are much better at speaking to foreigners than most American are.

And frankly, I have some rspect for the people who don't speak English. Unlike us South Asians who speak English as some post-Colonial hang up, they have their language and they use it.

Finally, it's damn hard to learn a language, especially when its so different from your native one. Japanese is not the hardest language to learn (out of what I've studied that distinction would either go to Chinese or Arabic). That some people can speak any English at all is amazing.