Real Time Telephone Translation

 What will happen of course, is that users will quickly correct their pronunciation and diction for the machine to work well. This is easy enough to do. It may in fact, lead generally to a universally cleaner form of each individual language. I am pleased that the progression of translation tools have advanced this far or perhaps the proper word is evolution.

What is becoming clear is that machine augmented speech is coming and a universal global language we will all easily use as a matter of course. That it will be a form of cleaned up English appears inevitable. Yet machine augmentation allows us to speak our native language cleanly in order to convert into a second language. Thus we will naturally learn to perfect out own language in order to access translation. This is a good compromise that will be good for most.

This will also naturally halt language drift generally. We will all know our own dialects but be also able to switch out. Dialects are drifting away anyway as populations mix and media dominates.

Japan firm launches real-time telephone translation

by Staff Writers

Tokyo (AFP) Oct 22, 2012

http://www.spacemart.com/reports/Japan_firm_launches_real-time_telephone_translation_999.html

Japan's biggest mobile operator said Monday it will launch a translation service that lets people chat over the telephone in several different languages.

The application for NTT DoCoMo subscribers will give two-way voice and text readouts of conversations between Japanese speakers and those talking in English, Chinese or Korean with a several-second delay, the firm said.

"Hanashite Honyaku" will be a free application that can be used on smartphones and tablet computers with the Android operating system, DoCoMo said.

Customers will also be able to call landlines using the service, it said, adding that voice-to-text readouts will soon be available in French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai.

"We hope that with this application, our subscribers will be able to widen the range of their communication," a company spokeswoman said.

However, she conceded the service does not offer perfect translations and has trouble deciphering some dialects.

DoCoMo also said it has launched a separate service that lets users translate menus and signage using the smartphone camera.