More Star Trek tech becomes reality: Microsoft unveils "universal translator"

Opty

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Okay, so it's not quite there, yet. But this is still a really cool step forward.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20266427

Software that can translate spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly has been demonstrated by Microsoft.

The software preserves intonation and cadence so the translated speech still sounds like the original speaker.

....

In the final few minutes of that presentation the words of Mr Rashid were almost instantly turned into Chinese by piping the spoken English through Microsoft's translation system. In addition, the machine-generated version of his words maintained some of his spoken style.
 

Don

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The acid test will be to see
How well it translates poetry.
If it can't translate political double-talk, legalese and Supreme Court decisions into something the average person can understand, it's not a Universal Translator. :D
 

Opty

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I wonder how it would translate, "Shaka, when the walls fell," and "Damok and Jalad at Tanagra."
 

RichardGarfinkle

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It's okay. Tamarian is a tough language.

But, you had to expect a Star Trek joke in this of all threads! :D

I know more than one linguist who hates the universal translator and loves that episode for exposing it for the sham it is.

This didn't stop some of them naming a server Tanagra so they could have Jalad@Tanagra.
 

Duncan J Macdonald

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I know more than one linguist who hates the universal translator and loves that episode for exposing it for the sham it is.

This didn't stop some of them naming a server Tanagra so they could have Jalad@Tanagra.

Another steady naming convention is to name a server 'Elvis'. Then, when you ping it, you get back 'Elvis is alive'

Geeks. Ya gotta love 'em.
 

Zoombie

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One thing that I actually really liked about Enterprise was that they had a linguist onboard.

...then they had her invent a universal translator in like five minutes and I flipped over my desk in fury and never watched the show again.
 

benbradley

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benbradley

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Here's a Ray Kurzweil talk from 2005 (it's long, an hour and 45 minutes, 49MB) with a demonstration of a translating telephone at an hour and two minutes in:
http://download.fora.tv/rss_media/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2005-09-23-kurzweil.mp3

He speaks in English, it translates and speaks in whatever (okay I'm horrible, I don't know what language that is), for a couple of minutes. Then without missing a beat he says a short sentence in a non-English language, then it ("she") detects the language and speaks the sentence in English.

Immediately before and after this he talks about how computer translations are being developed (by folks at Google as well as elsewhere) nowadays. I won't try to sum it up, but it's fascinating.
 

Vince524

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One thing that I actually really liked about Enterprise was that they had a linguist onboard.

...then they had her invent a universal translator in like five minutes and I flipped over my desk in fury and never watched the show again.

It got worse from there. That's the only Star Trek series that I have not seen each and every episode, multiple times. I gave up after season 3ish?

To boreingly go where the other shows had already gone before. Just not nearly as well.
 

Opty

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I guess this means that Microsoft just retconned the whole series.
 

Bartholomew

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This makes me wonder if I'm wasting my time learning Chinese. =|