“IT MIGHT seem like advances in language translation technology will soon cancel out the need for kids to learn foreign languages, but there are no signs that human translators will be out of a job just yet.
The field of machine translation (MT) has been around for years but it has improved significantly over the past decade. Now it is being merged with other technologies to give us the promise of highly convenient yet reasonably accurate tools that will allow us to decipher a range of foreign languages.
At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt demonstrated a new prototype of his firm’s visual search application, Google Goggles.
It works with the company’s MT technology, Google Translate, to make a smartphone application that can read a foreign language text taken by a camera photo, such as a menu or street sign, and get it translated instantly.
Google has also confirmed that it is working on a mobile speech-to-speech translation application that it expects to become available within a couple of years.”
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