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See what I’m saying? Glasses that ‘translate’ for you

Ever known someone who could understand you better once they put their glasses on?

Well, thanks to a new invention, doing just that might allow one person to understand another person speaking in a different language – in the not too distant future.

NEC last week unveiled their ‘Tele Scouter‘, a pair of glasses that ‘hears’ what is said and uses voice recognition to print a real-time translation directly onto the eye of the wearer. Widespread implementation of the technology, in an ideal world, would also mean that everyone can converse by speaking separate languages – seemingly eliminating the need for human interpretation.

Having considered this at length, I suspect that despite its intention to break down language barriers, this technology will in fact hit complications for the very thing it tries do to – removing the human element of interpreting.

As with machine translations, there is so much contextual content that simply doesn’t ‘compute’ and, as anyone in our industry will be able to tell you, interpreting is so much more than words.

ALS provides many interpreters to the public sector, and if you consider its use in hospitals or clinics where you can be dealing with sensitivities and feelings, there is so much room for error, not to mention the potential to unwittingly offend someone. So I would ask ‘would you want to take that risk?’

When I first read this (very interesting) story, I thought it was quite exciting. Technology is improving processes and efficiencies across so many industries and all new developments should be investigated and considered.

That said, there is still a huge way to go for machine translation. The fact is that anything based on current machine translation technology alone will unfortunately give you more problems than it can solve – unless you involve a human element to clean up the errors that are likely to occur.

I would very much like to know if this technology can recognise regional accents or dialects, for example.

If it can, take something you might say in every-day conversation, such as  “I’ve accounted for all of our group and everyone is present”. Using, as the Tele Scouter does, machine translation from a dialect of over 40,000 words, the resulting “translation” will try to make a statement about accounting and financial issues, before saying something about a gift.

Personally, as fun as it might be to try this out and, coupled with the use of a similar app developed for the iPhone recently, I think I’d stop short of going abroad and using this to ask for things like ‘drainpipe’ jeans…for now at least.

         

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