Posted on 01/14/2015 9:32:22 AM PST by Borges
The idea of a universal translator — a device that can seamlessly translate between languages — has been a longtime fixture in science fiction.
Technology hasn’t quite gotten there, even on Earth, but Google has come one step closer with an upgrade of the Google Translate application, which is being released on Wednesday.
The first part of the upgrade is a voice tool that makes it easier to have something resembling a natural conversation with a person using a different language by translating between two languages, using the microphone on a smartphone. Google Translate has had voice controls for a few years, but the latest version works more seamlessly.
(Excerpt) Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Eat Up Martha
I don’t know about the smartphone, but my desk computer and I love Google Translate as it is now.
Lol, good luck with Japanese.
For Japanese/English it sucks the big one.
Utter gobbledigook.
One reason I don’t use google’s translate as much as I would is that it doesn’t actually translate, but rather gives what words people use when they speak in another language. This means its useless when I want to know what songs, book passages, hymns and speeches really mean... instead of translating it, it tells me how those portions have been most commonly replaced in other languages. To know if I REALLY have a translation, I have to know whether the passage has been used in English by someone else already, and then how accurate, idiomatic and precise that translation is.
Good, its really sucked lately when used on some websites.
‘Word Lens: just point your camera to a sign or text and the translate app will instantly translate the text, even without internet/data connection
Word Lens was recently acquired by Google.
Interesting. It’s part of this update. I tried it just a bit and it superimposes English words on top of foreign words in the camera image.
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