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If you haven't tried the Google Translate app, it is stunning.
I speak into my iPad in English and within about a second it translates into understandable Japanese text, a bit stilted, and it will then read the Japanese text aloud in a very good voice that does not sound synthesized at all. Every person I have shown it to stands agape.
Works with about 50 languages in any pair combination.
The app is free.
Requires no training of the software.
Needs a WiFi connection.
Better than Star Trek's Universal Translator. The improvements outstrip even the wildest fantasies of the best SciFi writers.
The reason this is such a big deal is that Google Translate is constantly being improved when people suggest better translations. Ultimately, they will have software that can translate, albeit literally, instantly among hundreds of languages. After having scanned all the world's books, they can then go about translating each book into hundreds of languages. Of course won't work well for literature, but for factual matters should be very good.
As native English speakers, we have had an enormous advantage in having most of the technical and scientific information in English, and since we are native speakers, we can scan that information very rapidly. That advantage is vanishing and will be gone in a few years.
There are cell phones that do this in Japan, and I think there is also a version for Android.
Google Translate also works on computers. Go to the Google home page and poke around in "More" to find Translate.
I speak into my iPad in English and within about a second it translates into understandable Japanese text, a bit stilted, and it will then read the Japanese text aloud in a very good voice that does not sound synthesized at all. Every person I have shown it to stands agape.
Works with about 50 languages in any pair combination.
The app is free.
Requires no training of the software.
Needs a WiFi connection.
Better than Star Trek's Universal Translator. The improvements outstrip even the wildest fantasies of the best SciFi writers.
The reason this is such a big deal is that Google Translate is constantly being improved when people suggest better translations. Ultimately, they will have software that can translate, albeit literally, instantly among hundreds of languages. After having scanned all the world's books, they can then go about translating each book into hundreds of languages. Of course won't work well for literature, but for factual matters should be very good.
As native English speakers, we have had an enormous advantage in having most of the technical and scientific information in English, and since we are native speakers, we can scan that information very rapidly. That advantage is vanishing and will be gone in a few years.
There are cell phones that do this in Japan, and I think there is also a version for Android.
Google Translate also works on computers. Go to the Google home page and poke around in "More" to find Translate.
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