4/29/2003: Translating device for military

[Undertoad]

From here: what you're seeing there is a "phraselator" in use. This little device allows troops in Iraq and/or Afghanistan to use the phraselator to actually speak given phrases in the host language.

It looks like the soldier here is selecting from the menu-based phrase database, but the phraselator will also let the user speak directly into the unit with up to 3500 phrases.

Of course, there's no reverse phraselator for translation in the other direction, so it's probably hard to know whether the people take your precise meaning. (We recently had a set of anti-war Spaniards invade the Cellar. I tried to use Google's translation tools to speak directly to them, on their site in Spain -- and it just didn't fly. The translation was just not good enough for general usage, and there was a lot of confusion in trying to communicate two-way.)

The phraselator is interesting because it combines several developing technologies into one unit: handheld computing, voice recognition, and software translation. It's interesting when several technologies arrive at the same time, and bring about new approaches to the world.

You can easily imagine including wireless technology into this thing, so that if you wind up desperately needing stronger translations you could press a button and reach a human translator. Or include a memory card of some sort to load new languages on the fly. And after it's been developed for military applications, there's practically no cost to turn it into a consumer device; replace the military phrases with touristy ones, and suddenly any of us can visit any place in the world and chat with the locals, as long as we have one of these devices.