Millions of tourists from all over the world will converge in London for the 2012 Olympics next month, making the city the perfect location to test a new iPhone speech translation app.

Back in March we posted s story about a new language translation iPhone application that had been developed specifically for use at the London Olympic Games this year. With the event now practically upon us the app is ready to go.

The app was developed by the Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium (U-STAR), made up of researchers from 23 different countries. The software will support full speech language translation for 13 different languages and text translation for an additional 10 languages.

According to NewScientist.com the app, named VoiceTra4U-M, will allow people to converse with foreigners in their own language. Users will share a single iPhone for face-to-face conversations or make phone calls to anyone else using the app.

U-STAR says the machine translation process will take place on remote servers, introducing a slight delay into conversations, and the app will initially focus on translating tourism related words and phrases.

Up to five people will be able to converse at once, each in his or her own language, U-STAR added. In theory the system would support any number of people, but U-STAR has capped the app to reduce server load for the time being.

Alex Dupont

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
  Today, everyone has access to free Machine Translation (MT) through Google, Babel Fish, or Bing. You may even sample MT right here on the Language Translation, Inc. website for free.
• Universal speech translator app ready for Olympics
  In one month's time, millions of tourists from across the world will descend on London for the 2012 Olympics, creating the perfect test bed for a new speech translation iPhone app.
• More about the Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium (U-STAR)
  U-STAR is an international research collaboration entity formed to develop a network-based speech-to-speech translation with the aim of breaking language barriers around the world and to implement vocal communication between different languages.