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Toshiba Intros Trilingual Translation App For Cellphones
MojoKid writes "Shortly after hearing of a simple, two-way Spanish-to-English translator for the iPhone, Toshiba has announced that it has developed a new language translation system that requires no server-side interaction. The app is designed to be operated independently on a smartphone, which will eliminate costly data roaming fees that are generally incurred using systems that require an internet connection to retrieve translations. The system is trilingual in nature and enables users to translate freely among Japanese, Chinese, and English."
There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese.
Even bilingual people have trouble,www.engrish.com
And German is even relatively similar to English...aside from switching around word order and obeying German grammar, something can be phrased in German and English in a very similar way. It may sound clumsy in one language, but it can be understood. In comparison, a sentence translated from English to Japanese frequently uses a completely different word structure. As an example:
English: I like you
German: Ich mag dich.
The English and German bo take the form of [Subject Pronoun] [verb] [Object pronoun]. An equivalent in Japanese would be "Anata ga suki desu". That breaks down as [Pronoun] [Topic marker] [na-Adjective] [Formal copula]. And that's for a very simple sentence.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
anata wo suki desu
Anata ga suki desu would mean "You like [something]"
You would typically drop the "anata wo" and just say "suki da" and leave the rest to context. "desu" is a pretty formal for telling someone you like them. That is just a tiny drop in the enormous lake of cultural context you need to say even relatively simple stuff without fucking up in Japanese.
I think that a good JEEJ translation program would be pretty much synonymous with Kurzweil's singularity.