Last Wednesday Google added a very interesting feature to
its 'Google Translate' app, allowing users to instantly translate texts just by pointing their smartphone
camera at words in a foreign language.
Another new feature has the ability to translate
speech in real time into other languages, and vice versa, almost like the Babel
Fish from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (although not as quickly). Is
the future already here?Potentially, such application could have tremendous effect
on the way we communicate. The whole concept of learning a foreign language
might disappear. Will there still be a necessity for memorizing Chinese
hieroglyphs or French grammar, when a machine could make you understandable to
anyone in any part of the world? Provided the technology works, of course.
Let’s give it a try.
The app copes with translating the book title into
Russian pretty well.
And it can even understand the hand-writing.But what if one tried to translate something more
elaborate than a restaurant menu?
As you can see, the interpretation of McLuhan's "Understanding Media" from Russian to English is completely gibberish.
The same goes for the audio feature. Arabic to Russian
and Chinese to Russian translations were working properly, until we tried
saying something more difficult then “hello” and “how are you”.
Probably, this
technology will not make the whole industry of learning languages vanish any
time soon. However, it could be quite useful for travellers. And, who knows what
might happen in the future, when the app is significantly improved?
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