According to Reuters, Google is working on a whole news approach to translating from one language into another. To me this is extremely important because the largest single barrier I see to my vision of Global Neighborhoods is language.
As it stands now, computer translations, such as you get from Babblefish and Google translate are rarely close to accurate and often a bit goofy. The new approach, called “statistical machine translations” may still be a bit awkward and will still contain a few literal errors, but comes a whole lot closer to providing computer translations that come a whole lot closer to what human translators would give you.
Right now, I have conversations quite often with people all over the world, I like to say. But in fact, they are only people who speak English, the only language in which I have any proficiency. With the right translation technology could speak every day with people whose primary language was Chinese or Japanese, Russian, Farsi or whatever.
So could everybody.
If you think about it, the implications are really huge. People could everwhere could speak to people everywhere else. We would not have the filtering of third-party organizations deciding on what gets translated and how that translation will be nuanced.
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thx
Google is so good ..I believe she will make the best
Diplomatic talk beats the gibberish current primitive translators provide.
I work for an organisation that does translation into minority languages – http://wycliffe.org.uk
I'm sceptical of the results, but still interested in how it does turn out. Looking at the wikipedia article on the subject, they use large bodies of texts in two languages, like documents from the UN. The people we talk to will think we are diplomats!
I love Google. They absolutely inspire the rest of us wanna-be's in the software industry.
Shel
Think about this. TilaTequila already has 1.4 Million friends. How many more will she have when they are able to see she wants to be their friend?
I think on a serious note, I hope this will accentuate the similarities between people of nations, religions & languages.
Don't you just hate it when someone else has such an incredibly genius, obvious idea and then minute you read it, you think "of course!" Reading the write up I think 2 things: 1. Of course! This is a massive computerized rosetta stone. Sure there's going to be a lot of complex math behind it, but at its simplest, that's what it is. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? 2. And on the other end of the space time continuum, star trek universal translators, here we come!
Google does amaze and as you point out, the social implications are enormous.
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