With Google and Microsoft working to develop a real-time translating device, could the days of enrolling on a language course be a thing of the past?
How great would it be to be able to converse fluently or write a grammatically accurate and engaging email in Chinese, Russian and Italian?
Not that great, according to today’s university goers – few of whom are taking modern language degrees. Perhaps they think that translation software, which has moved on a great deal over recent years, will soon render obsolete the ability to communicate in foreign languages.
Google, for example, is working on software that can translate your words – written or spoken – in real time. And Microsoft demonstrated its speech recognition and translation software on a speech given by chief research officer Rick Rashid in November, 2012.
Mr Rashid’s speech – delivered in Tianjin, China – was translated from English to Chinese and the translation used his own voice, which had been sampled.
The aim of the work by Microsoft and Google Research is to create a device that could, for example, translate the words spoken into one handset so that the listener on the other end hears the words in his or her own language.
The Google Research team developing the software is not made up of linguists, though. Instead, they apply maths and statistics to the problem of translation, building algorithms that can correlate existing translations and find the most accurate one.
How great would it be to be able to converse fluently or write a grammatically accurate and engaging email in Chinese, Russian and Italian?
Not that great, according to today’s university goers – few of whom are taking modern language degrees. Perhaps they think that translation software, which has moved on a great deal over recent years, will soon render obsolete the ability to communicate in foreign languages.
Google, for example, is working on software that can translate your words – written or spoken – in real time. And Microsoft demonstrated its speech recognition and translation software on a speech given by chief research officer Rick Rashid in November, 2012.
Mr Rashid’s speech – delivered in Tianjin, China – was translated from English to Chinese and the translation used his own voice, which had been sampled.
The aim of the work by Microsoft and Google Research is to create a device that could, for example, translate the words spoken into one handset so that the listener on the other end hears the words in his or her own language.
The Google Research team developing the software is not made up of linguists, though. Instead, they apply maths and statistics to the problem of translation, building algorithms that can correlate existing translations and find the most accurate one.
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