In ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, which started life as a radio play in the 1970’s and has since become a multi-media (and indeed multi-lingua...
In ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, which started life as a radio play in the 1970’s and has since become a multi-media (and indeed multi-lingual) phenomenon, the author, Douglas Adams, described a curious ‘alien’ fish called a Babel Fish. This fascinating, yellow creature is inserted into the ear to translate from any language it hears to the person the ear belongs to. The clever fish, thus, enables the space voyager to communicate with any species it encounters. Perhaps, a once radical science fiction creation will now become a technological reality…
Most people may already be familiar with the idea of text-to-speech (TTS) translation services; i.e. typing in a phrase in one language for it to be processed and translated as a voice output in another language. Google has already made use of such technology in their phones. Now they are developing their telephone technology in order to translate a voice speaking in one language directly into another. This would undoubtedly be a big progression in improving cross-cultural communication.
However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Whilst a real life ‘Babel Fish’ is now more than a figment of an author’s imagination, it is unlikely to make a huge amount of headway anytime soon. Franz Och, research scientist for Google heading the machine translation group, has claimed that this translation service could be available in a couple of years’ time. There are, evidently, a few key obstacles to overcome. Namely, combining machine translation and voice recognition software, and minimising the occurrence of translation errors.
As those of us have used Google Translate and other machine translation tools will know, the results are often humorous and the translations far from natural sounding. As such, speech to speech translation technology is unlikely to threaten the future of the human interpreter to any great extent. Moreover, if the software is unable to successfully recognise accents there could be some laughable consequences!
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