Adventures In Translation On The Road

I made a recent two-week trip to Europe in four countries – the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.  A large part of the trip was in the countryside where, generally, a smaller percentage of the residents speak English well.  (Actually, the Netherlands is sort of an exception to this rule as a large number of people speak English everywhere and Dutch and English even have similar sounding words.)

In presentations, I’ve been highlighting the improvements over the last few years in real-time translation between different languages, especially the phone apps intended for this purpose.  So, I thought this would be an ideal test to see how well they worked in the real world.

I chose the two leaders – Google and Microsoft – and took them on the road with me.  I used these primarily to read menus, signs, information and the like in the foreign (non-English) language and translate into English.  I also used it to translate my written English into the foreign language so that a non-English speaker could I understand what I was asking for.  I tried a couple of times to use the speech recognition and speech synthesis capabilities of these apps, but that was limited for reasons I outline below.

Anyway, here are the results of my adventures in real time translation on the road.

Although not as smooth as the videos from the companies would have you believe, these apps generally worked pretty well.  Frankly, whatever the limitations, I would have been in deep trouble and frequently lost without these apps.

You should check how well each works in a particular country.  Google Translate did a better job in France and Microsoft Translator a better job in Germany.

Google bought the company that produced the original WordLens app that allowed you to hold your phone’s camera over non-English text and see it in English – a nice example of augmented reality (AR).  That software is still embedded in the Google Translate app.  It’s really cool, when you can hold your phone still over foreign text in good light.  As a practical matter, this isn’t always the case.  

That’s where Microsoft Translator has the edge because it doesn’t try to do the AR thing.  It just uses the camera to take a photo and then provides an alternative photo in English.  It was a nice way to create an English language menu.  Apparently I hadn’t been the only ones to do this since waiters usually just shook their heads in recognition – another American making English versions of printed menus unnecessary.  (Not really, of course, at least not yet.)

The speech and voice recognition capabilities in both apps require having a good internet connection, something that is not all that widespread when you’re interacting with people who don’t speak English.  In hotels, museums and offices where there is available wi-fi, most people speak English well enough.  It’s elsewhere that you need the translation capability and it seems there is a correlation between the availability of wi-fi and the percentage of people who speak English in a foreign country – or putting it the opposite way, you usually won’t have wi-fi when you need it to carry the translation duties.

So, it is best for both apps to download the complete file for whatever language you’re going to need.  For me, that meant downloading fairly large files of Dutch, French and German.  If you don’t download, then you’re going to need wi-fi even just for text.

As with any useful technology, you want it to get out of the way and become invisible.  While neither is invisible magic yet, Google Translate helps with a nice little trip.  If you type in English and then hold your phone sideways (horizontally), it shows the foreign language translation in big letters.  This is very useful in explaining to baristas and clerks in mini-marts what you want.  Microsoft has a similar capability, but requires an additional step to make it happen.  Here is what it would look like in Spanish if you type “please give me a large latte to go”.

One nice feature of Microsoft Translator is its phrase book.  This has many of the basic questions and requests that a tourist is likely to want to communicate.

All in all, I’m never going to travel in a non-English speaking country again without these apps.  This area of computer science has advanced rapidly over the last few years and I only expect it to get better, especially for offline use.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

Talk To Anyone In Any Language?

It’s been clear for some time that the Internet can connect everyone
around the globe – in theory. This opens up tremendous potential for
collaboration, mutual economic growth, education and a variety of other
benefits. We’ve seen many of those benefits, but we still haven’t
touched the surface.

Among other reasons the true potential of a
globally connected world hasn’t yet been realized is that many people
still can’t communicate when they communicate – they don’t speak the
same language.

So it has been interesting to me to see the recent
improvements in real time translation on the Internet. I’m not talking
about the translation of text that has been around for a couple of years
through, for example, Google Translate of websites or even the very
useful app, WordLens, which I have used in my travels when I had to read
foreign signs.

No, the new improvements are in speech – taking
speech from one language and ultimately, quickly converting it correctly
into another language. Although text translation is not easy, speech
introduces much greater challenges.

These new real-time voice
translation services and devices aren’t perfect, but they’ve improved
enough that they are usable. And that usability will begin to make all
the difference.

Last year, Google took its Translate app into speech. You can see a quick video example here. Google claims it can handle 90 of the world’s languages.

Then,
more recently, Skype made its Translator generally available, although
it’s clearly still in a sort of test mode. For English, Spanish, French,
German, Italian and Mandarin, Skype describes its capabilities quite simply:

“You
can call almost anyone who has Skype. It will translate your
conversation into another language in near real-time. What someone else
says is translated back in your language. An on-screen transcript of
your call is displayed.”

image

They have a charming video of school children in the US and Mexico talking to each other somewhat awkwardly.

There’s another video, titled “Speak Chinese Like A Local” with an American photojournalist in China arranging a tour for himself.

This translation work hasn’t only be done in the US. The Japanese have also been busy at this task, in their own way.

While not using the Internet, a Panasonic translator – in the form of a smart megaphone – will be tested at Narita Airport to translate between Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.

Then there’s the “ili”,
a portable device (also not connected to the Internet) which translates
between Japanese, Chinese and English. The company describes it as “the
world’s first wearable translator for travelers”. They’ve posted a
video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6ngM0LHxuU. The video is a strange combination of cute and creepy, but it gets the point across.

These developments have led some stories
to proclaim the arrival of the universal translator of Star Trek. But
as Trekkie experts say, unlike the one in Star Trek, this doesn’t read brains, which may have been a necessity to communicate with non-human species.  

On
the other hand, if you only want to talk with other people, the new
language translators are pretty good substitutes 😉 With more use, they
can only get better, faster, all the while helping to improve
understanding between people around the world.

image

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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