Google’s Project Glass inspires the invention of innovative spectacles that can translate foreign languages as they’re spoken.

The quest for reliable, real-time language translation without the need for a human interpreter isn’t exactly new. The U.S. military has been trying to perfect machine translation (otherwise known as automated or automatic translation) for some time now, and various related hand-held devices and software are currently available on the market.

But here’s an original approach that’s making the news in the world of translation. Will Powell, an enterprising programmer in the U.K., has managed to construct a pair of ‘automatic translator’ glasses, using ready-made devices and software.

Inspired by Google's Project Glass, Powell’s homemade device uses an operating system that closely resembles the one in Google's hugely popular Project Glass concept video, including a pair of Vuzix 3D glasses and a few other gadgets to display subtitles for up to 37 foreign languages in real-time.

Here’s how the device works. The glasses get the subtitles from a Raspberry Pi mini-computer running Linux, which beams the translated text onto the glasses. A Bluetooth microphone connected to a smartphone picks up any spoken dialogue and passes it to the Microsoft translation API that actually does the real-time translation and hands it over to the Raspberry Pi computer.

At this stage of development Powell’s glasses look a bit clunky compared to the sleek Google prototypes and his complicated set-up is hardly portable. Nevertheless it’s still a brilliant piece of improvisation and it could be the start of something big for the future.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation, Inc.

See Also

• More about language translation
  Translation is the act of rewriting a document, changing it into another language. The original language is called the source language. The language into which the source text is translated is called the target language.
• More about machine translation
  Raw Machine Translation (MT) may be sufficient for communicating via social networks, or getting the gist of a foreign language website. However, MT in itself is not good enough if you require a translation of publishable quality.
• Google Glass-Inspired Specs Can Translate Foreign Languages As They're Spoken by Jason Gilbert
  Google's Project Glass video -- released in April and shared wide and far over the Internet -- presented a set of so-called Google Glasses that were capable of several impressive functions.
• More about Google?s Project Glass
  Google: We think Glass helps you share your life as you?re living it; from life?s big moments to everyday experiences.