Babel fish phones
Looks like my daughter’s first keitai will come with a built-in translation feature.
Translation cell phone in the making for 2007 release
A groundbreaking cell phone that automatically translates the speaker’s language from Japanese to English and vice versa could be on the market by 2007, it has been learned.
Actually, I believe UltraBob was involved in providing a somewhat similar service (using real people to do the translating) before he went on to establish Akatombo Media. Looks like he may have gotten out of that business just in time.
Of course, given the difficulty of creating machine translations that are actually meaningful to the target audience, it may be a while before all the kinks are worked out of the system. If it works, though, it will be cool to have a Babel fish in my pocket.
The babelfish goes in your ear dagnabbit! Haven’t you ever read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?
Yeah, I used to work with JapanAid, but I wouldn’t say I got out of the market just in time. Babelfish and other text machine translators aren’t putting us out of translation work yet, so I doubt if voice ones will be much better. With that you run into a whole bunch of new hurdles (like not being able to examine the whole phrase at the same time, having to provide suitable intonation for different types of speech, understanding people from Ibaraki and Louisiana, etc.)
It’ll be an interesting technology to play with, but I doubt it will be ready for primetime for quite a while.
The babelfish goes in your ear dagnabbit!
Hey, you can try to put one of these phones in your ear if you want. I’ll keep mine in my pocket, thanks.
It’ll be an interesting technology to play with, but I doubt it will be ready for primetime for quite a while.
Oh, I entirely agree. The thing that surprised me about this news was that someone actually feels that this product will be ready for the market by 2007. No one can predict what strides machine translation will make between now and then, but let’s just say that I’m not investing in Babel fish phones at this point.
What kind of a sucker journalist fell for that?
This reminds me of commercially viable fusion, which has been 30 years away for about 40 years now. It may very well come before reliable machine translation.
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