Gizmodo: translators

Bowlingual Discovers that Every Dog Has an Inner Japanese Woman

Mark Wilson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:40:00 EDT

What is your dog trying to say when he's barking at bicyclists riding by your window? If only we spoke Japanese, we'd know.

Back in 2002, TakaraTomy released a device called the Bowlingual, which claimed to translate a dog's barking into human dialect you could read from a screen. Now, 7 years later, the company has updated Bowlingual to include vocalization—you know, like a text-to-speech GPS but for an animal discussing the merits of eating one's own feces.

It's a Japan-only toy, so the voice of the American dog movement will continue to go unheard. But do what we do and just assume that your dog is perpetually trying to warn you that the old mill is burning down. Better safe than sorry. [TakaraTomy via technabob via pocket-lint] The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Softbank's Speeek iPhone App Translates Spoken Japanese to English On the Fly

John Mahoney — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:15:00 EST

Speeek is an app that can recognize up to 1,500 spoken Japanese phrases and translate them into either English or Chinese. Pocket Babel Fish? Yes please.

This is, of course, only for Japanese speakers, and it only covers basic hello/goodbye/where is the bathroom type phrases, but this doesn't seem like too far of a leap for Google's voice search app, which would be pretty exciting. Even if it didn't read the words back to you—seeing your jibber jabber translated in close to real time into any one of Google Translate's 34 languages, well, sign me up. The app costs around $20 in Japan, and the English and Chinese versions are separate. [BBSS (translated) via DVICE]

ICANN Testing Domain Names In Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic and Other Alphabets

Wilson Rothman — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:10:11 EDT

ICANN, the governing body of domain names, says it will test out web addresses using Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil and both simplified and traditional Chinese. I guess this means that the inevitable collapse of all language into a bloated English hodgepodge is on hold. While it's nice for people to get domain names they can actually read, it pisses me off, because I like navigating non-English sites by their forced use of Roman-alphabet tags. Ironically, as machine translation gets better, the use of more and more languages and alphabets on the web might not really detract from its universality. But I can't help thinking there's something scary in this decision, scary, that is, for monolingual America. [Yahoo/AFP]

Star Trek Tech Arrives in VoxTec Phraselator P2

Charlie White — Mon, 14 May 2007 12:10:00 EDT

We mentioned a Star Trek-like Phraselater translation device a few years ago here on the Giz, but now it's new and improved. The Phraselator P2 from VoxTec is a bulky-looking hand-held contraption that functions like the Tower of Babel in your hands.

Its maker says it's ruggedized, unphased by a fumble onto pavement or a torrential rainstorm, and can translate phrases you speak in English into any language, and then translate back into English whatever people say to you. Hmm, that's a lot of languages—perhaps that's an exaggeration. Does it work, and how expensive is this thing?

Just like the latest Version 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you don't have to train it to understand your speech, and any male or female can use it right out of the box. It was developed for military use, so it must have some high technology inside, but that gives you a clue why the thing is so expensive: $2000.

Even so, it looks like it would be fun to take this baby out for a conversation or two. But then, there's no word whether it'll be able to translate GuySpeak into WomanSpeak. – Charlie White

Translator Gadget: Phraselator P2 by VoxTec [Product Reviews Net]

Tower of Babel Translator For Picking Up Hot Foreign Girls

Gizloco — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:38:17 EDT

Why limit yourself to knowing only one language when you pretend to know many more? That's what a bunch of U.S. scientists figured when they set about to create a "Tower Of Babel" translator. A series of electrodes connect to the user's neck and face to detect movements that are made when users mouth words. That is, by simply mouthing the word you want translated, rather than outright speaking them, the device can translate. There's two working prototypes right now, one that translates Chinese into English and one that translates from English into Spanish or German. Using a small vocabulary of about 100-200 words, scientists says they've attained an accuracy of 80 percent.

But think of the bigger picture: if scientists successfully made a device that translates all the world's languages, we'd be left without terrible Brad Pitt movies. And that, dear friends, would be a tragedy of unfathomable size and scope. – Nicholas Deleon

'Tower of Babel' translator made [BBC News]