My wife and I moved to El Paso, TX about 7 years ago. We had never been to El Paso before. We moved there for work and did not know what to expect. What we got was culture shock. Walking into a Target for household essentials the first day there, I was stunned that all of the signs were lettered in Spanish, with subtext in English. In the checkout line, I was the only person that spoke English to the clerk. El Paso gave me a very good lesson in how it feels to be a minority. It also gave me a clear understand of how divisive language can be. While I had some high school Spanish, it was no where near what I needed to converse to the majority of speakers in El Paso. I was part of a separate world than many of the people around me everyday.
Today there is a major debate underway in the United States about immigration reform. This is not a political post. But I will insert a little bit of opinion here. I think that it is counter-productive to have two national languages. It *does* divide people. It makes it more difficult to conduct commerce. It creates two peoples were there should only be one. This is where I think technology can solve the problem.
There have been a number of technology breakthroughs in the fields of translation in recent years. First, text translation has become a free, easy to find application on the Internet. My personalized Google homepage has a translation widget. A number of other web sites provide similar translation tools (I believe Google was not the first). While not perfectly accurate, they do a pretty nice job.
While this is a nice feature online, it really does not help in the real world. Real devices exist now, marketed at tourists. Do a simple Amazon.com search for “translation devices”, and you will find a number of products that are currently on the market to assist in translation. However, even these are really just the Google widget (above) repackaged in a portable device. But have no fear. There are significant efforts underway to create translation devices for the real world.
The United States Government has been dumping a lot of cash into voice recognizing, speech synthesizing translation devices for several years. A good example is the Phraselator. Usage of this device is detailed in a Stars and Stripes article about troops using the device oversees. About 7000 of the devices have been deployed in Iraq.
Here is a closer image of the device:
I am not going to be carrying that thing to the store anytime soon! But I am reminded of my first cell phone:
Remember that beast? It wouldn’t fit in my pocket, it carried a charge for about 2 hours, the signal sucked, and it had no features. I remember that they offered caller ID for free, and that was apparently a big deal.
The point here is that the Phraselator and similar technologies will shrink, and shrink fast. And while they are shrinking, they are going to get better. Actually, they are going to get much better. And we will find ways of integrating them with other technologies, like the cell phone.
I wonder how these devices will look10 years from now. What will technology be like then? Ten years ago I was just starting to program web pages. I had to explain to people what the Internet was. Today, everyone knows what the Internet is. Grade school kids can create web pages. I pay my bills online, surf the web on my phone while waiting in line at the store, and text message my wife and friends. I don’t think it is too outlandish to speculate that we will all have Bluetooth earbuds connected to our mobile phone/computer/camera/translator device.
I think it would be wonderful to be able to converse amongst cultures, based on a technology such as this. It would bring people together, and would make travel much more enjoyable. And I think this isn’t a pipe dream. I think this will become reality much sooner than people imagine.
Is that a translator in your pockets, or do you just want to talk to me in Spanish?
