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Wearable Translator to Debut at Comdex
quiller writes "Via is supposed to have a wearable PC that will take your voice, translate to seven different languages, and output the translated words through a speaker. Looks like something I want to look at while I'm there. " It will allegedly be showing at Lernout & Hauspie's booth, as it uses their translaton engine. The current specs have Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and
Spanish in the box. I think I'd need one - I'd feel so Arthur Dent.
Was it star trek or another show that had a "wearable transelator"?
Does anyone know if there is a site that keeps track of sci-fi items that have become reality?
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Time is on my side
Imagine life actually being like a bad japanese movie with voiceovers!
No one's voice syncing with their mouths would be very disconcerting. Too bad it doesn't do like the trek Universal Translator and change the apperance of their mouths to match.
Man walking down a street of Beijing: "I like the flawless beauty of the streets!"
Translator: The virginity of these pretty [women] turns me on in the road!"
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The things that people have said..
Ummm, anyone bite the wax tadpole lately?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"In this phrasebook, you have the Bulgarian expression 'Which way to the train station' translated as 'Please fondle my buttocks'...."
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
MarketingSpeak into plain English. It is Comdex after all.
On second thought, maybe you just turn it off the get the translation.
- Listen to a human
- Output to another language.
- Have another device listen to that output,
- Output back to the original language.
(In other words, box -i english -o mandarin < english.au | box -i mandarin -o english > english2.au) Only then will I be convinced that this isn't crap-joev
...you're not going to get the truly inter-planetary hitch-hikers wearing this thing. Fine it may do the job, but does it have the style, the finesse, of sticking a fish in your ear?
I think not!!!
Machine translation isn't there yet. Babelfish at least starts with what you want in the first language. Imagine feeding the output from a 95% accurate speech recognition system though babelfish. You'd come out with gibberish.
I'd prefer a system that assists me with speaking a second language. Something where I can be talking to someone, forget a word, hit a button on the Language eCoach(tm), say "you're welcome, in japanese" and hear "dou itashimashite" in a earphone. Or, someone says something I don't understand, so I repeat it to the translator and it gives me the english.
With such a device, it would be possible to have a conversation in a foreign language after about 80 hours of instruction, because you don't have to memorize heavy vocabulary. It would also make the learning itself easier, because you don't have to waste time looking stuff up in the dictionary.
If the translation was imperfect, it wouldn't matter so much. Maybe it'd give me different options, like if I say "bank, in german", it would say "with money, Bank, with river, Strand", and give the user the option of saying whatever is right. Babelfish translates "I went down to the bank" as "Ich ging unten zur Bank", which may or may not be what I meant.
Their website can be found here.
Let us hoping to be and that this one is can work much better at translation than for babelfish.altavista.com. Aha, I wager you are looking to next, and yet, for success!!!!- ---------------------
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As a graduate of the arduous Russian Basic Course at the Defense Language Institute and one of the best American-born Russian speakers, I think that the whole of electronic translation is shallow and no substitute for going out and learning a language.
When I've translated or interpreted (translation=written documents, interpreting=spoken in real-time), most of the time both of the parties have only a 75% clue as to what actually happened. They miss out on the connotation of the words, the hidden meanings that are derived from culture. In these cases, only the translator knows 100% of the transaction.
For example, "Perestrojka" is the restructuring of the Soviet government during the Gorbachev era, but it comes from the roots "pere" or repeating action, again, and "strojit" or building, erecting, organizing. It's not just a political process, it's also what happens after an earthquake, and what I would call the Post-Civil-War Reconstruction if I had to talk about it in Russian. So, to an American, it is the policy of restructuring the government, but to me, it means a broad revolution of culture, ideas, and politics.
Point being, that would be lost in an electronic translator. There are many concepts that don't translate no matter how hard you crunch code. You have to feel them.
As Americans, we have this belief that everybody should learn English to talk to us. There's a joke in Linguist circles, "what do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person that can speak three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person that can speak one language? American."
Europeans have great language programs for school children, and it is no big deal for someone to learn Italian just because they are going on a vacation to Italy.
If you want to go to a different country and buy souvenirs, get an electronic translator. If you want to bridge cultures, learn a language.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
I want 2 of 'em and start 'em off translating back & forth in a feedback loop, as in the two famous examples:
input: "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" -> russian -> back to english -> "the vodka is good but the meat is rotton"
input: "out of sight, out of mind" -> russian -> back to english -> "blind idiot"
etc.
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
I met some of their marketing folks at a recent tech show in Maine (yeah, in Maine!). I talked with them for 20 minutes about some things and I got a sweatshirt, but I also talked to them about many other things. They have a really cool tape device - well digital recorder - which plugs in with their Voice Recognition software. It's very cool.
Their Voice recognition is pretty decent, but I haven't played around with it enough to figure out how to add workds. I was up and runniing with the Voice Rec. software in about 20 minutes. 7 minutes install, 13 minutes Recognition testing... or whatever they call it 'signing in' I think.
I've used the program while on irc some, and while dictating some documents. It's all windows based, but they have made some serious strides. I like it. They're promising Mac versions of things soon, but had no plans for linux, (at the time I talked to them).
Some other things we talked about are covered in a non-disclosure, so I can't mention those... sorry.
They're cool people... and their marketing drones are freindly, relatively technically savvy people.
yacko
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
In case it matters, I am an American, I speak very poor Spanish dispite having a wife who is a native Spanish speaker. I spent 2 years at an international school, the Armand Hammer United World College, and have spent about 3 months of my life outside the US on various occasions. I use "Americans" in this comment to refer to United Statesians alone, and not to other inhabitants of the Americas.
Clearly geography is part of the answer, European countries are much smaller and more integrated with their neighbors than the US. Near the US/Mexico border, there are a large number of English speaking people that speak at least enough Spanish to conduct a simple consumer transaction. As you note, the only good way of learning a language is by being immersed in the language and culture.
Dominance is another part of the answer. In a world that is dominated by English speaking powers, particularily in economics and entertainment, most people an English speaker interacts with will have a working command of English. I suspect that when French (the original lingua franca) was dominant in diplomatic circles, that there was a similar lassitude on the part of French speakers.
However, neither of these factors explain the aggressiveness with which Americans are monolingual. In California, where there is a large population of native Spanish speakers, bilinugal education has been banned in public schools. Elsewhere, language education for childern is half-hearted at best, if it exists at all. As one of my Spanish professors told me, the stated purpose of most elementary foreign language education in the US is to assist in the teaching of English grammar and vocabulary, not to teach for fluency.
I think that the reason for the resistance to language education comes down to xenophobia and racism. Americans fear cultural encroachment, particularily by an increasingly large hispanic population. (This is of course ironic considering the cultural encroachment on the rest of the world by American culture, but Americans, as a rule, are poor connoisseurs of irony). Language is a particularly feared element of this cultural encroachment since language is so central to culture, and conversely a shared language connotes a certain degree of shared culture. There is of course a large measure of racism encapsulated in this fear. If Americans did not feel that immigrants were inferior, we would welcome their cultural and linguistic contributions.
As with any prejudice, there are legitimate fears as well as ignorant ones. Since preserving language is essential for preserving culture, a multi-lingual society is a more multi-cultural one, and multi-cultural societies, notwithstanding their benefits, are more suceptible to internal conflict.
In the midst of all this racism, xenophobia, and legitimate desire for a unifying national identity, the majority opinion is that immigrants should assimilate and learn English. This opinion is in fact shared by many if not most immigrants. Unfortunately, in the push to teach everybody English we come to the idea that not only should all immigrants learn English, but that the whole world should learn English.
So what's the solution? I wish I knew. If you come up with a solution that doesn't involve a gun I'll vote for you.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
I am keenly interested in this development, but not for its ability to translate languages. I was born deaf, and since I deal with mostly hearing people in my professional life, I have always wished I could have a little device that would print out what people are saying to me. Having the words projected on my glasses would make me live in a subtitled world, just like a foreign movie. Most of my co-workers know enough sign language from my insistence that they learn at least a few words and I can read lips with proficiency, so life is good in my happy world. Unfortuately, it's a big company and I must deal with many people in my day to day activities on the job. Current technology that requires software to be trained isn't practical for speech to text applications. The glasses idea has been tried by others. One interesting project I saw was a tiny LED that sat in the corner of your glasses, kind of like the permanent logo on TV programs. The LED didn't print out words, but merely glyphs for each phoneme it interpreted. I am not sure how it fared in the lab because the last I heard of it was about ten years ago. I did once participate in an experiment at the local University in which a very nice young lady strapped a sleeve to my forearm, and on the sleeve was a matrix of 64 motors which would buzz against my skin. The idea was that by recognizing patterns I would be able to recognize translated speech. It worked just about as well as you would expect but it did seem to improve my golf swing. At any rate, a wearable computer capable of translating spoken words into text without any training in any given situation would be the payoff for people such as myself looking to get ahead in their careers in an imperfect, non-sign language speaking world. I am looking forward to learning about this product and I hope it can be modified with ease to applicaitons such as mine. -Derrick
Or be prepared for a quizzical expression.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
Its really a pendant attached to a 100 lbs cage on wheels containing a 4-foot linguist on loan from a failing European power.
"The worst part is the number of Stephen Hawking prank calls will rise exponentialy."
Natural language processing is not advanced enough to produce any kind of real-world acceptable translation. Especially when we are talking about realtime voice recognition + translation stuff.
BTW, I'm a linguistics grad student. Not that that makes me be right in anything I say above, but at least I'm not speaking out of gross ignorance.
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it was my impression that this was a voice-to-voice system, so you must speak into it. If you spoke ghoti (and didn't say it "fish") then it would probably think "goatee". Of course if it is text-to-voice, then ghoti would be a screwball ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?