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.

Comments

Diplomatic incident waiting to happen!

[Enoch Root]

If this thing is as good as the Babelfish, I can just see it...

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."

Why Americans are aggressively monolingual

[copito]

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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