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Translation technology is finally catching up with consumer demand, with apps and services becoming better at real-time language conversation.
From smartphones with built-in translation services to apps and online translation services like Google Translate, there is now a whole world of ways to break down barriers between languages. And it just keeps growing.
One of the most recent developments is a prototype from Microsoft that translates voice conversations from one language to another in real time. Designed specifically for Skype, the service is the first of its kind and has huge potential to change the way we communicate with people around the world.
The service was revealed at the Code Conference in California on 27th May 2014, and demonstrated through a conversation between the Microsoft corporate vice president of Skype, Gurdeep Pall, and Microsoft employee Diana Heinrichs.
While Pall spoke in English during the conversation, Heinrichs spoke in German, letting the translation app do all the work to bridge the communication gaps. The demonstration wasn’t 100% word-perfect in its translations, but the accuracy and speed of the translation was impressive nonetheless.
Pall says that while it is still “early days” for the technology, the “Star Trek™ vision for a Universal Translator isn’t a galaxy away, and its potential is every bit as exciting as those Star Trek examples.”
“Skype Translator opens up so many possibilities to make meaningful connections in ways you never could before in education, diplomacy, multilingual families and in business,” he says in a blog post about the service.
He paints the vision of a future where technology allows us to “bridge geographic and language boundaries to connect mind to mind and heart to heart in ways never before possible”, and says that Microsoft’s investment in the Skype Translation services is working towards that goal.
“We’ve invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they’re emerging as important components in this more personal computing era,” he says.
Skype Translator will be available as a Windows 8 beta app before the end of 2014 and then gradually rolled out to support other operating systems and devices.
Lost In Translation?
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While many people are already calling this new app a “universal translator”, there is still a lot of scepticism around computer-based translation services.
As US-based company Advanced Language Translation says on its website, the technology has developed to the point where it is an effective solution in some – but not all – situations.
“There are some situations in which Machine Translation is enough and others in which human translators are the only option if you want quality results,” the company explains, giving examples of the accuracy and shortcomings that are encountered with computerised translation services (as opposed to using a skilled translator).
Language learning blogger and TEDx guest Benny Lewis, on the other hand, is far less forgiving of these services. In a post about translation apps for phones, he says these services are “are actually terribly inefficient and way off anything practical.”
Lewis – who has a degree in electronic engineering, experience working in voice recognition and fluency in over a dozen languages – says there is nothing that compares to actually speaking in the same language as the people you talk to.
“Mark my words: Based on my experience in both fields I can tell you right now that no app will ever make learning a language obsolete,”he writes on his website.
But the team behind Skype Translator is showing a lot more care than some of the apps Lewis talks about.
In the post about the development of the service, Microsoft outlines how much research has been done to develop an app that has both accuracy and learning/improving abilities, with consideration of conversational language and “disfluency” (the difference between how people write and talk), among other things.
The fact that Skype lets people see the person they are talking to also means that any non-verbal communication can still inform the conversation and add to the understanding between people, which is part of what makes this app so groundbreaking.
Although other services may have extensive research behind them, and while trained translators can explain specific phrases and linguistic nuances, being able to understand the words and see the person you are talking to is a step closer to the kind of communication people like Benny Lewis are passionate about.
While Skype Translator may not ever be the answer to learning a language, there is no doubt it will influence and inform the ways people communicate around the world.
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