Star Trek Universal Translator

(Best Syndication News) The Star Trek “universal translator” is one step closer today as Google launches their Google Translate phone app. All you need is a mobile phone running the Android operating system.

There is a whole science devoted to the subject of Machine Translation (MT). Google has been working on this for years and has already designed several applications for the web that allows users to translate text. So far their translator only works in English, Mandarin and Japanese languages. The application can also translate “text” from 50 different languages.

Let’s say you are visiting a business contact who only speaks Chinese. You can speak into the phone and after a second or two your words will be translated into Chinese and spoken to your contact. He then can speak into the phone and his speech will be translated into your language.

The voice is still tinny and robotic sounding and there is quite a way to go, according to scientists involved in machine translation. Google’s massive data network around the world (believed to be the largest), can help provide the massive computing power necessary for MT.

Last month the company announced it was working on an image analysis and translation tool. A person could take a photo using their phone and have a menu (or other printed material) translated into their language.

Voice or speech recognition and the artificial intelligence associated with speech translation is an important technology that Google is working on. Scientists have moved from a rules-based approach to a statistical approach for translation.

Rules Based Approach:

A rules-based translation will convert the foreign words into the user’s language. The computer will parse the text before translation, but the technology requires extensive lexicons with morphological, syntactic, and semantic information, and large sets of rules.

Statistical Approach:

The statistical approach, or a hybrid of rules and statistics, may be the best approach. Computers will take the phrase and compare it to thousands or millions related phrases to guess what is said or meant.

IBM and other companies have been working on translators for many years. A voice translator may be a huge boom for the Google Android operating system when customers are faced with various options including the Apple iPhone or other non-Android OS phones (Google also makes a text translator app for the iPhone though).

By: Mark Williams