Well the other day I was having lunch with my colleagues and the tv in our office cafeteria was on and I saw the add of an Instant Messenger and suddenly out of the blue I thought of something regarding IMs.
As far as my knowledge goes, currently when you are text chatting with another person using an IM it is but mandatory that we use the same language for communication. But what if there was a mechanism for a real time transliteration or even better a translation of the languages. For eg., if I am talking to a person say from Germany and we both do not have any common language, when I type in english it gets translated in real time and he/she sees the text in german and replies in german and I see it in english. This would be a great feature to reduce the communication barriers.
This can also be extended to telephones where our speech can be translated in real time and played back in the language of the correspondee. But this would be difficult as there would be a time lag and the speech recognition has to have the intelligence to figure out the languages at real time and also the question of translation on a per word basis or sentence basis will be a lingering question.
But atleast this can be suited for text messaging either using an IM or the SMS/text messaging using a cell phone.
As usual I would be really interested in getting your feedback on the same and tell me if the bulb will fuse soon or has already.
1 comment:
Thalaivar Tenson,
I don't know if software is really capable of "understanding" language. Translators work (mostly) by translating individual words or common phrases. But the meaning of the sentence is at times lost.
The "my mom is nice and cool" English->Spanish->English Google translation fiasco is an example. Google has fixed the bug, but in my view there still is a some time before real time translation that yields meaningful sentences becomes feasible.
Post a Comment