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One Step Toward a Babel Fish: Real-Time Voice Translation For Phones
the_newsbeagle writes "Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish, which lived in the brain and could translate any language in the universe, was so incredibly useful that it simultaneously proved and disproved the existence of God. This real-time translation app for mobile phones, offered by the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo, isn't going to freak out theologians any time soon. The company admits it has lots of work to do to improve translation accuracy, and it can currently only translate between Japanese and three languages: English, Korean, and Mandarin. But by allowing phone calls to pierce the language barrier, we just might have taken a step toward the universe that Adams envisioned: one where open communication between people of different cultures leads to an onslaught of terrible bloody warfare."
It isn't a step towards the babel fish at all. The babel fish delivered brain waves directly to the speach center of the listening person thus needed no knowledge of the language being spoken or received. Simply processing one understood language to another is not any sort of step towards a babel fish.
The Babelfish lived in your ear, not your brain.
Any American who's been to Australia or the U.K. knows the Grand Canyon-esque gap in context and meaning between their slang and idiom-ridden English and our slang and idiom-ridden English.