Translation
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
July 16, 2007 Speaking via an interpreter is difficult enough at the best of times, so you can imagine the difficulties soldiers in foreign lands have communicating with the population when there is a significant language barrier, no interpreter and lots of big guns in the near vicinity. The AHKY (Arabic for ‘speak’ ) is a new wrist worn translation device developed by Iraqi-born University of Derby student, Amin Ismail, will soon tackle the problem when it is deployed by British troops serving in Iraq. The AHKY currently has ten phrases which have been programmed in English, Arabic and Kurdish. Phrases such as ‘nothing will happen to you’; ‘turn around slowly’; and ‘come here’. Other languages and phrases specific for a user’s specific mission are uploaded prior to each use. Read More
