"Alex Waibel doesn't understand Chinese, but he can read street signs when in
Beijing. A team of engineers led by Waibel at Germany's Karlsruhe University has
developed a handheld device called the Sign Translator. It uses an integrated
camera and software that recognizes, and translates into English, about 3,000
Chinese characters.
The Sign Translator is the cutting edge of a raft of breakthrough
developments in translation technology coming down the pipeline. Governmants in
Europe, rather than corporations, are driving much of the innovation -- and with
good reason. Consider the European Union: in Brussels, the world's largest
translation and interpretation operation spends more than $875 million a
year ferrying information in and out of the bloc's 21 official languages.
A three-year EU project called TC-STAR is pumping $12 million into
language-software R&D. One grantee, Germany's Siemens, has developed
software that recognizes spoken words, transcribes them, translates the
transcription and then utters the translation by patching together syllables
pre-recorded by native speakers in several languages. Siemens' LectureTranslator
System will be installed first in the European Parliament, probably within two
years. This system and others promise to slash the cost of the European
Commission's commitment to multilingualism -- and undercut calls to make English
the European bureaucracy's sole working language."1
Language
Translation is a business translation company located in San Diego,
California that has been in business for 17 years serving the U.S. with document
translation services, website
localization and software
localization services.
Harold Nevin
1By Benjamin Sutherland of Newsweek International, March 13, 2006
Issue | 
