The Future Is Here Today...Robots, Genetics, AI, Longevity, Singularity

Global Twitter: Tweets Translated Into Any Language

Comments

by Aaron Saenz on February 3rd, 2010

Automatic language translators are taking your tweets to a global audience.

The universal translator was once a convenient fiction from Star Trek that let aliens break through language barriers, but now it’s an awe inspiring reality. Automatic language converters are on the internet, in your iPhone, and they’re ready to take on Twitter.  Companies like Twanslate, Twinslator, and Tweet Translate will take your tweet and change it into any one of a myriad of languages you choose. Lost in a foreign land? Now you can let your tweets speak for you. Twitter itself recently began translating its pages into non-English languages. Soon visitors to Twitter will be able to read the main text of the site in any of the world’s languages from Arabic to Urdu. It’s probably only a matter of time before Twitter adopts a universal translator into the site itself. Think about that! You tweet in one language and Twitter would automatically broadcast it in another. Just click on a twitter feed and you can read it, no matter where it’s from. Universal translators are going to take the tweet from a fad to the forerunner of global society.

Read More

Universal Translators Are All Around Us (Video)

Comments

by Aaron Saenz on November 23rd, 2009
Will the iPhone be the Universal Translator of the future?

Will the iPhone be the Universal Translator of the future?

When watching Star Trek, I was always amazed that the aliens all spoke English. Writers explained this happy coincidence by the presence of a universal translator (UT), a portable device which could take any language and translate it into any other language as needed. Our nonfictional modern world has more than 20,000 different languages (if you include dialects) in its history. With the rise of globalization we desperately need an universal translator to help us speak to one another. Luckily, there are several different companies that are taking the first steps to creating an UT. Sahkr and Jibbigo have developed iPhone Apps which transform the smart phone into a handheld speech to speech translator. Check out some of their demo videos after the break.

Computer aided speech to speech translation isn’t easy. You need speech recognition, language analysis, machine translation, language generation, and speech synthesis. We’ve had limited handheld translators for some time. Devices like Voxtec’s Phraselator allow you to select a range of sentences and have them translated into many different languages. We’ve also had more complex non-portable systems (like IBM’s MASTOR) which can do nearly full translation. But the products created by Sahkr and Jibbigo represent a new paradigm in speech to speech: commonly used hardware devices adapted solely through software. By integrating into an existing hardware platform, these next generation programs are taking us one step closer to having a universal translator that anyone can carry in their hands.

Read More