Consecutive interpretation by Chrome browser and on your smart phone…

Although it’s not quite what you might find aboard the Starship Enterprise, Google has made another step forward in the development of machine translation. An innovative feature released last year is now widely available on Chrome. The feature allows you to talk and translate automatically, much like the universal translator used in the science fiction TV series Star Trek.

Google has made it possible for Chrome to recognize speech and use it as an input method. In a post at the official Google Chrome Blog, software engineer Josh Estelle explains one of the possible uses of speech as an input method: translation. “You can now go into Google Translate, speak English (or any other supported language), have it translated and then spoken back to you in the translated language you chose.” Got a minute? Here’s a sixty second video clip of the new feature in action.

As you may have noticed, there are already practical applications in use of the technology needed to make a universal translator operable. Your smartphone, for example, probably has at least one app that makes use of voice recognition. Google Translate for Android has been downloaded over 10 million times with the latest release in January. And as you might imagine, the U.S. military, namely DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is steps ahead and has developed a portable two-way speech translation system that enables an average soldier to communicate with a person who cannot speak English.

Now, while all these applications may not quite rival the universal translator in Star Trek, they are at least steps in the right direction. So keep scanning…

Alex Dupont

See Also

• More about machine translation
  How editing by human translators make machine translation nearly perfect.
• www.languagetranslation.com
  Professional language translation and interpreting since 1989.