Bi-Lingual Conversation

[Ai]

A "Tower of Babel" device that gives the illusion of being bilingual is being developed by US scientists.

Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6083994.stm

I expect to be abusing foreigners within 10 years even more fluently.

[Darren337]

i expect that i will be able to commit huge errors in miscommunication and blame it on a doubtful piece of technology. Kinda sad, learn a damn language, i am.

[Z_Blitz]

Yeah its like what Darren says. Even it manages to translate whatever is being said from one language to another then that doesn't necessarily mean it would be capable of translating phrases. I speak 2 languages and it sounds very awkward when you try to translate what you want to say word for word. Grammar adjustments are going to be painful since not all languages follow the same grammatical structure (Subject-Verb-Object).

[Ai]

True..

A conversation would probably be something like

"I am/is/myself want/need/obtain money/currency/cash/dough"

Expecially since many languages have subtly different inflections or words for the same thing. But it is a step in the right direction. A major problem nowdays in our global enviroment is the language barrier.

[The_Supervisor]

U should try out this text to speech demo:
http://demo.acapela-group.com/

it's pretty fun to play around with, though not as advanced as the speech to speech one we're talking about here, though I think that'll be much harder to realize

[azumi149]

Yeah its like what Darren says. Even it manages to translate whatever is being said from one language to another then that doesn't necessarily mean it would be capable of translating phrases. I speak 2 languages and it sounds very awkward when you try to translate what you want to say word for word. Grammar adjustments are going to be painful since not all languages follow the same grammatical structure (Subject-Verb-Object).
right you are captain...

im fluent in 3 languages (actually 2 languages and a local dialect), and if i translate a sentence, for example tagalog-english literally, it sounds awful...

[Kenken]

yeah, that's why i never translate from english to spanish or from spanish to english, is easier to understand of the phrase as a whole than the meaning of the words by themselves

[M-50]

I think that this is a pretty good piece of technology and it will work. Because there are many people who don't either have the time to learn or cannot learn a new language and that would come in pretty useful for them. Although this does kinda encourage people not to learn languages if you can just use this.

[VipER]

Yeah its like what Darren says. Even it manages to translate whatever is being said from one language to another then that doesn't necessarily mean it would be capable of translating phrases. I speak 2 languages and it sounds very awkward when you try to translate what you want to say word for word. Grammar adjustments are going to be painful since not all languages follow the same grammatical structure (Subject-Verb-Object).

exactly...i speek 2 languages too n its not an easy thing to translate directly those languages...u cant just translate it by matching the words coz it will not sounds right n plus it might means differently...

[_mike_]

wow!!! this will be friggin awesome!!. tho i already speak 4 languages *shrug* tho itll be cool it can actually translate....NO MORE SUBBED ANIME!!!!!:Domo

[Evanesque]

wow, this is definitely cause a lot of misunderstandings...*sigh*..

[Nicole]

Haha. I can totally see lots of Engrish going on. But yeah, I know two languages (almost) and it's very different translating between the two word to word. Half of it wouldn't even make sense in spoken English.

I like the thought, but I'm not sure we should really carry it out.

Make them lazy people learn other languages. =P

[Cloud]

If only this would work nicely. That way I can watch Jimbo make fun of everybody. Not just the ones that speak English or Chinese. :D

[rOyKiA]

There will definitely be a huge miscommunication happening...

...translating a sentence from one language to another is not as simple as translating a word.