Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"