

Google Translate now with real-time audio translation - justnearme
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/google-translate-real-time/

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DarkShikari
Such a thing is useless without half-decent translation. Google Translate, as
far as I know, currently uses a phrase-based statistical model which is beyond
terrible: it isn't aware of context or grammar. It's basically operating on
the theory that if you stuff enough training data into a bad model, it'll
magically stop being bad.

You're lucky if you can even _understand_ the output of a Google translation
from Chinese or Japanese, let alone the translation being correct. Among
machine translators, it's widely considered to be one of the worst in
existence (e.g. see the "Translation Experiment" at
<http://amaterasu.is.moelicious.be/blog/?p=771>).

Rules-based translators with vastly less training data than Google's tend to
give far better results... and even then, they tend to be wrong constantly:
_"As you can see, four of the seven lines in this edited machine translation
are almost the complete opposite of what the Japanese actually meant."_

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trevelyan
Chinese to English translation is technically very hard (I've worked on an
open source translation engine -> <http://adsotrans.com/downloads>). While
there are definitely lots of easy ways that Google can improve its translation
(introducing a rules-based pre-processor to stop it from screwing up names and
numbers would be a good start), it's worth remembering that Google is the
start-up when it comes to machine translation. They lured Franz Och (author of
GIZA++) away from academia and gave him the computing power to single-handedly
crush everyone working on MT in the government-academia complex and in DOD
funded companies like Language Weaver. In response, NIST changed the
competition rules to penalize Google for not using NIST data.

Google needs to improve its Chinese-English machine translation for the same
reason it needs to keep working on Chinese -- you can't organize the world's
information if you don't understand its largest language. But the underlying
problem is that Google isn't engaging with China and doesn't seem capable of
hiring people who actually straddle both worlds. Not that it hasn't followed
Systran down the rules-based path.

Realistically, I don't see any other company out there which is making the
sort of progress that they are in MT. The fact they are still wrong on
occasion when tackling distant language pairs seems more a result of their
being held back by a universal architecture for developing MT systems, not
because they need to go back to an exclusively rules-based system. The future
is hybrid anyway.

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pmichaud
Ok but, the speech to text ability really sucks right now. I use google voice,
and the transcriptions are ALWAYS mangled.

So you have the transcription, which sucks right now. Almost unusable.

Then you have the translation which can be okay depending on how simple the
phrase is. So you're going to inputting a garbage transcription into a dubious
translation engine.

Then you can output the voice, which I know works well now, great.

But the other pieces doesn't seem to be good enough yet in real world
situations.

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bane
This is some serious Star Trek stuff.

Or maybe the TV show "Timecop" (I think that's the one), where the
protagonist, using little more than his wits and a handheld credit card
computer kept chrononaut baddies from altering the past. Considering how close
my phone is to the size of a credit card, we may be less than a decade away
from that kind of thing.

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InclinedPlane
You mean "Time Trax": <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106154/>

Timecop was a Van Damme movie.

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bane
That's it. Darn my faulty memory.

I thought the idea was ridiculous at the time...but now I look at my phones
and realize how close it is to being realized.

