:applauseUniversal Translation Will be Commonplace in Mobile Devices
Google
DARPA has been working on a universal translator for decades, with varying degrees of success (and failure). Language, it turns out, is an incredibly complex thing, especially when you get down to the micro level and start examining regional dialects, slang, and other semantic nuance. But as the cloud goes, so goes our ability to translate on the fly.
“Language translation won’t take place on the device, it takes place in the cloud,†Liebhold says. “In order for a computer to detect what it is your saying, it has to compare what you’re saying with millions of other examples. That’s done in the cloud. So it’s reasonable to say that any device with a network connection will be able to translate languages.â€
But, he cautions, while we should be able to seamlessly swap words between the mainstream languages on our mobile devices by 2020 (we can do that now, to some extent, with Google Translate), minority languages will still be a long time coming. Companies (like Google) and governments are putting together very good bodies of knowledge for this kind of translation--Google is combing through U.N. transcripts to see how even lesser-spoken tongues translate spoken English, and vice versa--it will simply take time for translation to become accurate and effective.
PopSci Predicts: Probable, but with varying degrees of accuracy depending on the language.
