Translation

Once when I was visiting Montreal, I went into a restaurant and discovered that the menu was entirely in French. Not wanting to admit that I couldn’t read the language, I was instead forced to order the only two things I recognized the names of: Caesar salad and calamari. Had smartphones been around at the time, I definitely could have used Purdue University’s new food translator app. It not only translates the names of foreign-language dishes, but it also tells you what they are and what’s in them. Read More

Whether browsing through the latest technology news, following the exploits of your favorite musician or film star or looking up exotic holiday destinations, chances are you will bump into a language that's not your own. Thanks to online translation services, most of us can usually get the gist of what's going on, but there are occasions when typing a word into a translation box is just not convenient. Penpower Technology has an alternative solution in the form of an application that uses the camera on the iPhone and Google's translation service to offer instant word translation and definition. Read More

With over 170 languages spoken in the U.S. alone, medical personnel attending an emergency or working in a busy hospital are no doubt often faced with communication problems when trying to dispense treatment. The Phrazer offers a possible solution to this problem. It is billed as the world's first multilingual communication system, where patients provide medical background information, symptoms or complaints with the help of a virtual onscreen doctor speaking in their own native tongue. This information is then summarized into a medical record compatible with all major EMR systems. Read More

IFA is billed as the world’s largest consumer electronics and home appliances tradeshow, so it's fitting that the closing address for the 2010 event was delivered by the CEO of one of the biggest players in the technology space – Dr. Eric Schmidt of Google Inc. He discussed the age of the smartphone, cloud computing, plus some tasty samples of Google TV and what's just around the corner for the Android platform including a game-changing tool for mobile speech translation called "conversation mode"... read on for a summary of the key points. Read More

Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), the non-profit organization that makes Miro - the cross-platform, free software video player and downloader - has embarked on a Herculean task of subtitling all videos on the Web. PCF is creating Universal Subtitles, an open standard protocol that will allow clients such as Firefox extensions, desktop video players, websites, or browsers to find and download matching subtitles from subtitle databases when they play video. But first, the company needs the subtitles. That’s where you come in. Read More

The days of a Universal Translator like the one that made chatting between alien species a non-issue in Star Trek might be some way off yet. But a new device from NEC is definitely a step in the right direction for those of us on planet Earth looking for a way to communicate with other language speakers that doesn’t involve a human translator or a well-thumbed phrase book. The prototype device called a “Tele Scouter” is a glasses type display that translates the foreign language being spoken by a partner and projects the translation onto a tiny retinal display. Read More

The Rosetta Stone is a famous ancient Egyptian artifact discovered in 1799 that helped linguists unlock the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's therefore an apt name for the company which has developed products designed to teach millions of people worldwide the secret of learning languages using interactive, computer based technology. Already laying claim to the title of the world's largest language software company, Rosetta Stone has now taken the plunge and gone public, the first company of its type to do so. Read More

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most amazing intellectuals and inventors of our time. From his teenage years he's been building a long list of extraordinary achievements, from his early work teaching computers to compose music, to his world-first font-independent optical character recognition system, to his pioneering electric synthesizers that are so accurate that even musicians can't discern them from a real piano in listening tests. In 1976, blind music legend Stevie Wonder bought the first production model of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a tabletop-sized device that was able to scan text documents and read them out using a text-to-speech engine. Last year, Kurzweil teamed up with Nokia to integrate the reading machine and its synthetic voice into the N82 mobile phone, letting blind or illiterate users read documents, menus, bills, and anything else they could capture on the phone's inbuilt camera. Now, Kurzweil has announced that the kReader phone can translate text it captures that's in another language and read it out to you in your language. It also has new text-tracking abilities to make it even easier to capture all the text on a page. Read More

April 7, 2008 Nokia unveiled a plethora of mobile phone functionality concepts last October at The Way We Live Next briefing in Finland and tucked away behind the high profile apps was a simple shoot-to-translate function. Inveterate traveler Dave Weinstein dropped in at CTIA last week and reports that he focussed straight away on the cameraphone translator that can supposedly translate Chinese to English from a photo taken on the phone. “You can imagine how useful it would be for me, but it was just a technology demo. They wouldn't let me load the app on my phone or tell me any real info about it”, says Dave, who spends most of his time in Beijing these days. Read More