Google Aims To Be Your Universal Translator 122
mpicpp sends word about Google's latest translate technology. "Google is beaming a bit closer to Star Trek's universal translator with the newest edition of its Translate app. Rolling out over the next few days for iOS and Android users, the latest version of Google Translate offers two key features — the ability to instantly converse with someone speaking in a different language and the capability to translate street signs and other images into your native language. Both features have been available in the Android app to some extent. For example, Google Translate for Android has long offered real-time translation of conversations. But Google's goal behind the latest version of the app is to enhance and simplify the features so they work more quickly and fluidly without any lag time. The latest version of Google Translate aims to change that. To converse with someone speaking in a different language, a user chooses his language and that of the other speaker. He then taps the microphone icon in the app, starts speaking in his native or selected language, and then taps the mic icon again. The app will recognize which of the two languages is being spoken, and then the two speakers can carry on their conversation without having to keep tapping the mic. In a test of the app's instant translation, The New York Times said it did prove to be a step forward; though, it's not science fiction just yet. The app fared best with short sentences that didn't include jargon, and it worked better when the users paused between each translation. Google also has beefed up the app's ability to translate street signs. Previously, you'd have to take a photo of the foreign text to get a translation of it. Now, you simply point your camera at the sign and the translated text appears overlaid on your screen — even if you're not connected to the Internet. This feature is made possible courtesy of Quest Visual's Word Lens app for iOS and Android, which Google acquired when it purchased the company last May. This feature supports English translated to and from French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Google says it's working to add more languages."
Baby Translator (Score:4, Funny)
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Simpsons did it!
Re: Baby Translator (Score:1)
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I'd like a Canine to English translator too.
I'm pretty sure at least one of my dogs is the equivalent of Anchorman's 'Brick' character.
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I'd like a Canine to English translator too.
I think you might be disappointed... I suspect Gary Larson was spot-on [whichdog101.com].
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Goodness, struck a nerve there, but tell me down-modders, what exactly did I say here that isn't really true.
That would be backwards (Score:1)
I think your expected to teach your kid to speak your language.
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I think your expected to teach your kid to speak your language.
You're parent's oviously didnt?
Re:Baby Translator (Score:5, Funny)
How about a wife translator? Give me a program that accurately parses "I'm not mad" into "no sex for you for a month," "it's not important" into "this should be number 1 on your priority list," etc. etc.
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Now why would I want my wife to know that when I say "I'll do it in five minutes" I really mean "not important, get to it when I can, probably quicker to do it yourself"?
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If only they could translate what my 18 month old is saying!
When my younger son was about a year old, I asked his (2 year) older brother what he was saying. I figured that maybe being close in age he could remember or something. Older son looked at me like I was from Mars and said "I don't know!" and went back to his blocks.
English to American (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:English to American (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sorry, I'm not putting that in my mouth.
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I'm sorry, I'm not putting that in my mouth.
Universal response to a fag in your mouth: Light the end on fire. The problem will take care of itself no mater what country you are in.
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The Westboro Baptist folks were very excited when they heard that millions of fags are burned in the UK every day.*
*With apologies to Gaiman & Pratchett, who made this joke years ago in Good Omens.
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"Hi, I'm Randy." Randy = popular male first name in American English, horny in British English.
"Knock me up in the morning." Knock up = wake up in British English, get pregnant in American English,
rubber = eraser in British English, condom in American English
"Blow me" = expression of surprise in British English, insult where a male insinuates requesting a blowjob in American English.
pissed = annoyed
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first floor in British English = second floor to Americans, first floor in American English = ground floor to Brits.
Does this difference also occur in elevator controls?
Limited list of languages (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not really ready until it supports Andorian, Cardassian, Ferengi, Romulan, Vulcan and New York City slang.
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What about jive?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Well we know the killer apps will be in translating Gorn and Tamarian.
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Google has no honour.
Add languages.... (Score:1)
Temba, at rest (Score:5, Funny)
Uzani, his army with fists closed.
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orokana otaku Nihongo wa suu
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Japanese? Cue a spin-off app called "Real Time Engrish".
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Japanese is a bit too complex and contextual for computers just yet. Even just parsing Japanese text with computers at high accuracy is a problem. Then there is information that can be omitted, inferred, or implied based on context in Japanese. If Slashdot supported unicode, I could give examples of Japanese text that can easily be understood by those that know elementary-level Japanese, but are parsed like complete ass by computers (even on the Google Translate site).
This would compound with spoken Japanes
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Still useless to Brazilian portuguese (Score:2)
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A Brazilian like me will have to do a good effort to make sense from what you wrote if you do not know brazilian portuguese and try to use Google translate.
I spent two years in Brazil, and my wife is brasileira. I find that by speaking both English and Brazilian Portuguese I can understand most translation mix-ups between these languages. As an example, the confusion over do and make.
Big Brother Is Expanding His Reach (Score:5, Insightful)
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...now they will have access to people's actual conversations, not just search queries...
Not just search queries.
You forgot that google has collected info about all the contents of your emails (to, cc, subject, and body), your entire contact list (names, phone numbers, addresses, notes), your calendar (birthdays, ages, appointments), all contents of anything you put on gdrive (images, files), and all phone calls and sms activity. There is sure to be more.
They *are* evil.
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Only if you use gmail, or communicate by email with someone else who does.
Re:Big Brother Is Expanding His Reach (Score:4, Interesting)
I've thought for a long time that 'big brother' will not come from governments, but from corporations.
A few of the many important differences:
1) Consent. No one is forcing me to use Google products. (Well, except my employer, which contracts with Google for email and various other services, but anything that they have access to is my employer's property anyway and I have no expectation of privacy to begin with.) I could completely banish Google from my personal life without severely impacting anything I do. It's a little more difficult to escape the reach of governments.
2) Competition. Microsoft and Yahoo would be happy to handle my email instead. I can't switch governments without physically moving to another country. (Voting doesn't count, and I don't vote anyway.) Conversely, it would not be a huge burden for me to jettison all Apple or Microsoft products, although it would be problematic for my music collection.
3) Force. Google does not have the ability to dispatch a SWAT team to break down my door, shoot my dog, and haul me out in handcuffs. And why would they, anyway? They don't care what activities I'm engaging in offline except for the purpose of targeting advertisements.
There are certainly all sorts of things that corporations can do to make our lives unpleasant, but it seems rather perverse to worry about creeping corporate dictatorship because of Google's ad targeting, especially given the track record of governments.
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I'd like to see you try.
Because in the end, Google gets your information anyw
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Because in the end, Google gets your information anyways because I'm certain a significant number of people you email use Gmail. And on analysis, that can easily be 50% or more emails now archived by Google about you.
Which still doesn't negate points (2) and (3). What could they possibly do with partial email conversations? I don't put anything important and/or sensitive in email anyway - I mean, that's like the very first thing I learned about email ("don't send anything over email you aren't willing to
Re:Big Brother Is Expanding His Reach (Score:4, Insightful)
Ultimately, the government is accountable to the people since the people grant the government the power to do what it does. The government thus has an incentive to please the people since those exercising that power usually wish to get re-elected. And if a government does something horrible enough, the people rise up and topple it and replace it.
I'd argue that most of recorded history indicates that citizens are willing to put up with a huge amount of government misbehavior as long as it's not directed towards them personally, and are also far too willing to let bygones be bygones in cases where draconian punishment is called for. The CIA's torture is only the most recent example. Again, we're talking about matters of life and death, which is far beyond the powers of mere corporations.
A corporation on the other hand is only accountable to the shareholders and its ultimate obligation is just to maximize shareholder wealth.
True, but a corporation is also obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which it operates, which includes the pretty much universal understanding that the government has a monopoly on force. The government can also invade my privacy at will, including interfering with my personal contracts with telecoms and Internet companies, but Google cannot simply decide to listen in on my cell phone conversations.
(And I'm not a libertarian, so I have no idea what your screed about libertarians has to do with anything.)
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While I agree largely about governments, I don't think you're suspicious enough about corporations.
Corporations do not necessarily have to follow the laws of the countries where they operate. They have to follow some, but they typically get away with a lot of illegal activities. In some cases, these actions are simply overlooked, while in others the penalties imposed are far smaller than the profits from the activity. In still other cases, the illegal acts are performed by a spin-off corporation desig
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The US Government didn't have to pressure most telecoms to get access to their data.
They're the US government - the pressure is implicit. (And, I suspect, far more explicit than we've been told about, since some of the tech executives involved have made it clear that they can't really go into details about what happened behind the scenes.)
Presumably Google can purchase similar access.
Sure, but again, why is this necessarily more frightening than the government having access? If Google tries to blackmail o
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The fact that people tolerate it is unfortunate but not an argument in favor of trusting corporations. We've already seen that corporations have far worse ethics and the only thing which keeps them from behaving even worse than a government is that they have less power. They do their utmost to exploit anything and everything if they can get away with it and - as already stated - have less transparency and less accountability to society. Think of e.g. the Bhopal disaster or Slaughter-House cases.
I don't thin
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And you'd get no privacy with either, as well. So competition does not make a real difference to you, the user.
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And you'd get no privacy with either, as well. So competition does not make a real difference to you
I hate to parrot the free-market fundamentalists, but seriously: if the privacy you speak of was really that valuable, there would be a market for it, and I could find a competitor who wasn't mining my emails for information. (And there probably is, I'm just too busy to look right now, and frankly I'd rather have the free service.) Or, hell, I could just buy a domain and set up my own email server, or do ot
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One problem with privacy is the lack of real information. I can read privacy policies. I can't be sure companies are following them. It's one of those cases where, at best, I can pay real money for something I can't be assured of getting.
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One problem with privacy is the lack of real information. I can read privacy policies. I can't be sure companies are following them.
Sure, but how can you be certain that the government is following the published laws? We've seen time and again that they'll simply ignore the law if it's inconvenient (my favorite example is China's state media whining about "constitutionalism", as if rule of law was some radical Western concept), and the US government has repeatedly used the justification of "we can't tell y
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I don't think you're getting my point.
I'm not at all happy with government surveillance, but there are differences in what companies do (until they're deprived of government contracts and their CEO thoroughly investigated, anyway). Companies will do different things with other companies. There's no reason that company A might not take my privacy much more seriously than company B, and if I'm willing to pay for privacy they could theoretically make money off me.
Unfortunately, I have no way of enforcin
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And you'd get no privacy with either, as well. So competition does not make a real difference to you, the user.
Who exactly do you think you'd get privacy with?
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I've thought for a long time that 'big brother' will not come from governments, but from corporations.
What convinced you? The massive developments at the NSA?
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casual use only (Score:3)
Fine for ordering in a restaurant or asking directions. Not appropriate for business, medical or government communication, contracts, etc.
Re:casual use only (Score:5, Insightful)
Like everything new it isn't fully developed. But you'll be wrong about business, medical, and government use much sooner than you think.
But does it swim? (Score:5, Funny)
It's less creepy than having this damned fish in my ear all the time.
Babelfish are go. (Score:3)
Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED".
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that." and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
I love living in the future! (Score:2)
Looking forward to the day when I can watch old European softcore movies on Youtube and actually understand what's going on. (Besides the obvious.)
Re:I love living in the future! (Score:4, Funny)
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I would assume both that 100% of it is in the cloud, and that to Google, that is a feature, not a bug.
Re:Baby Names are pure comedy gold (Score:5, Interesting)
Proper nouns that are regular words can definitely provide some laughs for machine translation, but it's not as bad as it seems. Even to a native English speaker, a kid named North West [mashable.com] is kind of funny.
Understanding a foreign language will always require some knowledge of the culture and society from which you are translating from, and so if you know the culture has kids named for "Sky" and "Hope" then to see those words pop up in sentences where it doesn't really fit you aren't surprised.
The best example of this is in Hofstader's GEB, where he talks about translating Dostoevsky to English. The translator has a choice to make when copying the name of the main street. It is an actual Russian word, that has an English translation. So maybe you translate the street name to it's English equivalent. But the Russian street name is a common Russian street name, whereas in English it's not a common name for a street at all. So maybe instead of simply directly translating the Russian name, you change it to a nice, comfortable English street name, like "Elm Street." He ends up humorously suggesting the best choice in translation might be to just read a Dickens novel!
Windows Phone? (Score:1)
I thought that this was already available on Windows Phone?
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To translate it must first understand (Score:2)
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My hovercraft is full of eels.
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Absolutely sucks in two seconds time might be better than you spending two years learning the language to be better, though.
(As an expat, who moved without knowledge of the local language, I'd say that Google Translate is surpassed after about the one year mark.)
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> In that culture, it wasn't "bad" to marry someone under-age
I'm reading A Distant Mirror (and you should too, it's amazing!). The Duke of something-or-other has just married a 12 year old. Much chiding ensued. But other than that, both commonplace and well admired. Hey, you have a 50% chance of not making it to 20, so you had to get married early to lock down that dowry.
Best line from the book... A knight and Lady are having a conversation, and she implies he'd be bad in the sack because his beard has l
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Arabic is there in the Bing translator, which you could use for not just ISIS, but also Hizbullah, Hamas, Ikhwan and a whole host of other Islamic beauties
And the resulting insult would be something along the lines of "Stain sheep, devout cleric!" when translated back....
English is a language that's much easier to translate to than Arabic. Sure, it's lossy, but going the other way, you end up saying lots of things you didn't actually mean, due to the weighted multiple meanings assigned to each character or phoneme. Once you get past the basics like al and ibn, you'd better know the cultural context.
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If it's not available you can always use simple English to send your love words to Bush, Cheney and all other American assholes who led to the illegal invasion of an Arab country, leading to 100'000s deaths and the total destruction of its social construct.
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Now what I want to see is what they translate Arnold Schwarzenagger going "Ah blah agggh da da bah Ha!" to.
So then... (Score:2)
"But Google's goal behind the latest version of the app is to enhance and simplify the features so they work more quickly and fluidly without any lag time. The latest version of Google Translate aims to change that."
So... slower and laggier in the new version then?
Maybe the story author needs Google Translate.
how about dictionary first? (Score:2)
It can't become a translator any time soon. It's not even an adequate dictionary yet.
Value Subtracting (Score:2)
Unless and until Google starts to hire actual translators and pay them actual money, this is value subtracting and will suck income out of the very translators it depends on. If we are really unlucky, it will be an unsustainable parasitism, driving translators out of work and actually reducing the ability of the world to deal with multiple languages.
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Unless and until Google starts to hire actual translators and pay them actual money, this is value subtracting and will suck income out of the very translators it depends on. If we are really unlucky, it will be an unsustainable parasitism, driving translators out of work and actually reducing the ability of the world to deal with multiple languages.
I tend to think that Google Translate provides professional translators with a neverending supply of work, while they try to extract their client from whatever mess Google Translate got them into.
Seriously... GT does the sort of work that nobody ever hired a professional translator for. This frees them up to do the real work. And if a professional translator can't do better than GT, then that's a job that's becoming more specialized... kind of like the farrier and the haberdasher.
nothing like Star Trek (Score:2)
Not quite (Score:2)
"For Google is a bit close beaming of iOS and Android users to the latest version and Star Trek universal translator of the translation application, translate rolling, the latest version of Google is two to offer an important function over the next few days - . Conversely both features to instantly fart the ability to some extent in another language and the native language that is used in Android apps and someone who speaks to the ability to convert the road signs and other images. for example, for Google's
ASL? (Score:1)
Interpreters get paid $100 and up to do the job now. A few million people could use a translator for that. Difficulty: it's a visual language.