Google has (possibly) done it again! Word on the street says that Google engineers are working on a translator for the Android smart phone that will translate one language to another- almost completely in real time. Now, there’s a few problems in the past that have appeared when trying to do anything involving voice translation. First off, the pronunciation problem. Everybody has different ways of saying things and often times it doesn’t translate correctly.
Ever use those voice to text translators? If you say “the fish is in the lake bed” it translates it to text and says something like, “the dish is in the cake head”. What?! The other problem is that the dictionaries are so limited that often times it can’t even keep up with the human language. Throw slang and a foreign language into this and it spells trouble.
I used Babel Fish one time to translate a Japanese message that was saying “I’ll call you tomorrow” and the translation came out to say “tomorrow I will use the telephone on you!!” Something innocent turns into somewhat of a threat when a literal word by word conversion is used without artificial intelligence.
Google has come up with a few solutions to these pesky problems for its up coming Android translator. It will be crawling through various web pages and documents in different languages so that it can get an artificial grasp on the human language. The translator will also be able to view the words as part of a whole; fully understanding the complete sentence rather than each word separately.
This tool is expected to support a 52-language text translation, along with voice recognition and text to speech capabilities.
Communication is a vital part of everything we do. We need it for everything, including sitting down with the CEO of a Japanese company via video conference with your corporation. While the internet allows communication overseas and makes business easier, the language barrier that accompanies this freedom often stands in the way. If all goes well, this tool could be utilized by individuals and businesses to bridge the gap in culture and language.
