Translation Technology

Newsweek International has published an interesting article on translation technology.

 

The article describes various projects underway (mostly in Europe) to create machines for understanding and communicating to humans. Especially intriguing are the "ceiling-mounted 'audio-beam' speakers" by DaimlerChrysler that are capable of projecting sound 5 meters to an area as small as a single seat. This would potentially replace headphones at conferences or other places such as the U.N.

 

One thing that I think is interesting about the translation and interpretation arena is that a lot of the technological advances seem to be happening in Europe. I'm sure that this has something to do with the fact that a lot of European countries have more than a single official language, and therefore government is more involved in streamlining translation and interpretation, as opposed to the United States, where English is the defacto language and it is usually companies that are working on translation issues in order to increase revenue.

 

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