Microsoft Translating Telephone

Technology is amazing. Microsoft is amazing. TechFair2010 held in Silicon Valley featured the latest and greatest innovations including Microsoft’s Translating Telephone. This machines acts as a language translator. With two people wearing headphones, the computer will listen and provide consecutive interpretation. We viewed a demonstration of this language translator telephone and were not surprised by the results. It proved again that a machine cannot replace a human language translator. Don’t get me wrong, the translating telephone is a very cool tool that does give each person the gist of what the other is saying, but it was evident that this machine could not be relied upon in cases where errors in a translation service can be detrimental or even fatal.

In the demo we could see that simple questions like “Do you like football or basketball?” or “What is your favorite type of food?” were easily translated by the language translator tool. However, a question like “How long have you been working on this program?” lead the technician to describe what the functions of the program were instead.

There will always be language translator tools that try to perfect the art of accurate and reliable professional translation services. It will truly be amazing when someone develops a language interpreter tool that matches dialect, idioms, culture influences, and regional accents as a professional human language translator does daily and with ease.