I'm sure I am not alone in thinking that we cannot be far from having the technology to do quite sophisticated instant voice translation. If you had a mobile device capable of translating your speech instantly into another language, why would you bother with the lengthy and difficult process of learning a language?
The iTranslate app from Sonic Mobile does a decent job for simple sentences across a wide range of languages. You choose your source language and target language, tap, make your utterance and await the translation which appears almost instantly in written form, then, within a second or two, spoken. I have tried a few utterances and the voice recognition is pretty good, whilst the pronunciation of the translated utterance is accurate. You can speak at a reasonable pace, but the quality of translation is less sophisticated than, say, Google Translate. For a traveller needing to produce simple questions or statements the app is very effective. Grammatical complexity produces mixed results. A school student could find it useful for basic translation and to be able to hear accurately pronounced target language. I would happily recommend this to students, with the usual caveat that accuracy is by no means guaranteed. The main user would be the business person or tourist wanting to produce or imitate simple utterances to achieve a specific task, rather than engage in meaningful conversation. Teachers need not fear for their jobs yet, but I can foresee a day when lazy people will ask why they should bother learning a language when a device can do it for you.
The iTranslate app from Sonic Mobile does a decent job for simple sentences across a wide range of languages. You choose your source language and target language, tap, make your utterance and await the translation which appears almost instantly in written form, then, within a second or two, spoken. I have tried a few utterances and the voice recognition is pretty good, whilst the pronunciation of the translated utterance is accurate. You can speak at a reasonable pace, but the quality of translation is less sophisticated than, say, Google Translate. For a traveller needing to produce simple questions or statements the app is very effective. Grammatical complexity produces mixed results. A school student could find it useful for basic translation and to be able to hear accurately pronounced target language. I would happily recommend this to students, with the usual caveat that accuracy is by no means guaranteed. The main user would be the business person or tourist wanting to produce or imitate simple utterances to achieve a specific task, rather than engage in meaningful conversation. Teachers need not fear for their jobs yet, but I can foresee a day when lazy people will ask why they should bother learning a language when a device can do it for you.
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