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Copier Auto-Translates Japanese to English

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hopefully-better-than-babelfish dept.

StCredZero writes "Wild. Fuji has created a photocopier that automatically translates documents from Japanese to English. That's pretty nuts. Apparently, the copier can figure out what sections are text, OCR the text, send it to a translation engine, and put the english back into place."

2 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I just photocopied this article by Helios1182 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement. It just happens that the general public doesn't have access to the state of the art research. Systems are improving all of the time. They won't, however; reach the level of a fluent human translator for a long time if ever. But for most documents a machine will be able to do a decent job.

  2. It's the voluntary collaboration with a data tap.. by cheros · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What is wild is that anyone with half a working braincell would use a photocopier in an office where a copy of every document is sent to an uncontrolled 3rd party for translation.

    Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..

    (not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).

    So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.

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