Language translating ear buds... AMAZING!
 

This could seriously be a game changer for the world as we know it.. I think this is going to be an amazing product if it works as designed/intended. One world, one language.. Wow!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/meet-the-pilot-smart-earpiece-language-translator-headphones-travel#/

And I see now that Google has their own version..

Wow, that's just too cool. I will be the first in line to buy it. I feel for one of my laborer or my cleaning lady on my construction job site.

Babelfish!

Brilliant!

One step closer to the "Universal Translator".

LOL, I work in translation.
Those things only "work" in certain language-combinations and in very specific areas.
Machine Translation simply does not work very well and never will.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TayZG3aFubs

^ Especially when you have one language but 10 dialects.

I'm super interested in this tech, but will have to wait until its available for the iPhone. I'm not gonna jump platforms. This would have really come in handy a few months ago when I had a captive audience with a couple of nice officers in Moldova. We had real problems working out the finer details of the transaction, even though we both had smartphones to do the translating. It was really awkward.

(sigh, if the english ever learned how to speak english..)

is that Merican english or the Queen's?

Cool. Maybe I'll figure out what maricon means.

I think it means "cool dude"

Not yet, but it will. Its all about big data. You can have oceanic amounts of data available on local dialects, right down to the village level given enough time. As long as the ear buds know where they are on earth, they can adjust. Will there always be that random guy in Iowa speaking swahili? Yes. :D

No thanks. I'd rather not overhear people *****ing about how their husbands won't take out the trash...

Yeah, but think about sitting down at a poker table in remote place where no one expects you to understand what is being said.

Methinks you underestimate our ability to develop technology. "Never" is a very, very long time - in this case probably a decade or so.

_

Yes..^^

Nope. You would be surprised about how far away from this tech we really are.
There is so much fake and prepared stuff in this area.

And look at Google Translate and the Microsoft Knowledge Base.
The Microsoft KB is getting worse. We actually where rather surprised by the quality until some year ago. Now it is almost not readable anymore.
Same with Google Translate. You only get back the quality the users feed the tool with.
I think many users make fun out of the possiblity to recommend false translations and that is the downfall of Big Data. Once in the system, it is almost impossible to correct. Where to start?

It is a nightmare to correct Translation Memories!

My two kroner:

I was EVP/CMO of the largest language translation company in 2001 (BGS), and just exited as CEO of a small translation company (Elanex). What Holger says is largely correct - from the perspective of absolute accuracy of language. If a machine translates something, you can't be 100% sure it is 100% right. If a trained professional translator does, you are 99.999% there.

MT (machine translation) has always been a "next ten year" technology for the past forty years. However, last Fall Google MT made a step-change improvement in MT by using a neural network model. It was most notable in Japanese where translations that were largely laughable became more passable. Not good enough to put on your website, but the gisting was pretty good. The major language pairs - DE/IT/ES/EN - are remarkable good. It will continue to get better as the previous SMBT (Statistical) approach seemed to plateau even with gigantic corpora (database of sentence pairs).

But Holger brings a good point about gunged up TM's and certainly there is a lot of garbage out there and it is growing. If I'm publishing customer facing content that relates to my brand, health and safety information, instructions, etc. it will for sure be done by a professional translator. If the language pair, TM is big, and MT results are good enough, I'd be happy to use something called PEMT (post edited machine translation) to speed the output and lower the cost. But again, I'll always want a human involved.

The hardest part about automating translation is teaching a machine to understand context. That's why rules-based MT systems failed early - there are not enough rules to understand the implied subject of a sentence, etc. For example, in English, the subject can be implicit and understood by the listener/reader. In Japanese, the subject is always explicit, and repeated over and over. Those sorts of structural differences, plus general nuance of spoken language (previous sentence hints) makes this a big leap.

Anyone that uses Siri or the android equivalent knows that voice recognition gets better and better. Once you have speech to text working well, then plug in an MT engine and the appropriate text to speech system and you have automated verbal translation. Would I want to use this for a medical conversation or a business transaction? Not today, not for a very, very long time. Would I want to use it to find the best tacos in the neighborhood? Yes.

Microsoft released Skype Translator. That's pretty much how the earpiece thing works. You can give it a try with your friends overseas. Also, if you have not tried the Google Translate App with Wordlens - it translates text your smartphone camera is reading on the fly. Pretty amazing for menus and road signs when you travel and have the right data plan.

I'm quite happy to be out of the day-to-day slog of convincing companies to spend large sums on translating content when some executive that's never left the country says, "just use Google translate, it's free."

I also think that the perfection we once demanded for printed materials has really degraded over the last decade. Part of this is a 140, oops, 280 character way of expressing ourselves; people that think by putting "sent from my iPhone" is an excuse not to proofread; and also because of agile development and publishing moving to an online medium where the cost to fix is zero (unlike a printed manual). All of these forces plus technology is accelerating the adoption rate and acceptance of MT.

Perhaps the easier it is for us to communicate with people we don't understand the better off the world might be. That's a reason to hope this technology really does become mainstream.

Now where's the mouthpiece that spits out the other language when I talk?

My gf is Vietnamese. Hard to imagine this would ever work with VN. I say that based on the gibberish I see come out of Facebook and Google translators when I run Vietnamese text through them.

Thank you Don, a very nice summary! This is exactly what I am dealing with every day!

Regarding: "just use Google translate, its for free" many companies (in Europe at least) are blocking that service because some managers did not use their brain and posted sensitive content to Google Translate. Needless to say: yeah, Google does nothing with that text, sure, right.

Correcting a TM is a nightmare, correcting "Big Data" (whatever that is out of) is not possible.