My credit card is suffering from swipe fatigue - Mageek
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Lost in collaborative translation
STILL LATE to the Internet party, Microsoft is working on a collaborative translation framework API (v2) with a widget translator.
In a blog post, the Vole revealed that it is beavering away on a pre-release language translation scheme that it claims "combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation."
It is developing the technology to bring real-time translations to websites via the Bing Translator service. At the moment this feature is limited to seven out of Bing's 30 languages with Microsoft due to roll out more languages.
Version 2 of the translation framework has added a 'batch' interface to deal with more data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL and the addition of "Translate-and-Speak", a text-to-speech functionality.
Google has embedded translation technology all over its applications, including Wave, though that's still limited preview only. Actually, Google has already staked its claim on real-time speech-to-speech translation as reported in the Times Online last month.
If you want to sign up to try out the Vole's translation technology you can attend a session here. µ
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Can I add that Google's "Babel Fish" translator will in never solve the language problem. Not only does it discriminate against anyone who cannot afford a mobile phone, but against minority language groups as well.
There are 6,800 languages worldwide, not fifty-two !
Moreover, if I met a native in Borneo, and he said to me in Hakka "I've lost my mobile phone" how would I understand him :) And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !
As English loses its economic power, the answer is not for us to move to Mandarin Chinese, but to Esperanto which puts all speakers on an equal footing.
Have a look at http://www.lernu.net or http://www.esperanto.net
Looks like Microsoft is going head to head with the big G and actually might defeat him in this battlefield.
The combination of machine and human translation might be a real threat to translation services such as Tomedes ( http://www.tomedes.com )