Eye don’t be leave it
Being sceptical about the claims made for machine translation seems my default setting now. And as the claims get loftier, so my eyebrows arch that little bit more.
Now NEC Corp has announced that “it has developed an automatic Japanese to English speech translation software tool for mobile phones for Japanese travelers abroad.”
When a user utters a sentence in Japanese, it is displayed on the screen of the cell phone and immediately translated into English, the electronics firm said.
The process of recognizing a Japanese sentence and displaying it on the screen takes about a second and another second or so is required for the English version to be displayed.
The software is equipped with around 50,000 words mainly relevant to tourists.
Voice recognition twinned with machine translation? Sounds like twice the potential for Python-esque disasters (”I will not buy this record, it is scratched.”)
The report goes on to say “NEC expects to develop a handset incorporating the software, which is still at an experimental level.” So I won’t expect the holy grail for Christmas then.
Actually, to me, Japanese seems to be a language simple enough for computerized translations from Japanese to another language. Almost no tenses, no weird rules, etc.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:25 am[...] Eye don’t be leave it [...]
December 5th, 2007 at 2:21 amProvided they stick to simple phrases and grammar, I don’t see why this couldn’t work. The processing power of devices is always improving as is the quality of voice recognition software (ex., the NYTimes tech columnist Pogue does most of his writing w/ voice recognition software). I could easily see this working for simple tourist conversations (directions, shopping, hotels, etc.)
December 5th, 2007 at 3:04 am