No need for English lessons?

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Don't bother to learn foreign languages: Google to launch smartphones that will translate for you in real time 

It could be the end of learning a foreign language. Internet giant Google is developing software which it claims will be able to translate conversations almost instantaneously. 

Like a real-life Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the firm says it would enable people to communicate without understanding a word of one another's mother tongue. 

Based on Google's existing software for automatically converting websites and documents into a different language, it would use a voice recognition system to translate real-time speech. 

While it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, the multinational says the technology could be available on phones within a couple of years. 

However sceptics are likely to point out that text automatically translated by Google is currently littered with grammatical errors. 

Meanwhile linguists doubt whether voice recognition technology will be able to cope with a full range of regional accents for many years to come. 

Best known for its Internet search engine, Google unveiled its first mobile phone last month, the Nexus One. 

Intended as a rival for Apple's iPhone, it already features voice recognition technology, but it is the prospect of combining this with automatic translation software that promises a communication revolution. 

If it can be perfected, the system would enable a customer to call someone who speaks a different language and automatically have their conversation translated so they could understand one another. 

Rather than translating word for word, the phone would act like a human interpreter, waiting to hear short sections of speech to enable it to glean the sense before 'saying' them in a different language. 

Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, said: 'We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time. 

'Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on.' 

While early versions of Google's website translation software sometimes produced little more than gobbledegook, an ever-growing database has enabled it to achieve far greater accuracy. 

So far it covers 52 of the world's estimated 6,000 languages, the latest being Haitian Creole. 

Google admits speech will be an even tougher challenge than text but says a customer's phone would adapt to its user by 'learning' their style of talking. 

'Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,' said Mr Och. 'But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.' 

And as with automatic text translation, what may begin as a fairly primitive technique will, Google hopes, become more sophisticated with the help of millions of users around the world. 

However language experts believe the prospect of such technology supplanting the ability to speak a foreign tongue is a distant one. 

David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said the problems of dealing with speed of speech and range of accents could prove insurmountable. 

'No system at the moment can handle that properly,' he added. In Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish was a small yellow creature capable of translating any language when placed in a person's ear. 

It sparked a bloody war because everyone became able to understand what other people were saying.

 

Source: Daily Mail