Lingo-ist-ics
A true saint
Eusebius Hieronymous Sophronius - Jerome to his friends- was a scholar, theologian and translator born circa 340 AD. Earning his place in history for his translations of the Old and New Testaments into Latin, his work set the standard for translators who followed. He was not afraid of admitting his ignorance on occasion and indeed continued to revise some of his translations, making corrections and additions. He was well aware that a translation's accuracy depended greatly on the reliability of the source text. Not infallible however – his famous mistranslation of the original Hebrew for 'rays of light' coming from his head with 'horns’, meant that a horned Moses is often portrayed in medieval artwork. Canonised, St. Jerome is the patron saint of translators and 30 September (the date of his death) is marked by translators and interpreters around the world.
Go go gadget
Everyone loves a hi-tech toy but...
The US military is supposedly investing more than $44m into the "Phraselator”. This is a hand-held device that can be used in the field to ease face-to-face interaction with foreign nationals using machine voice-recognition technology.
When the user speaks an English phrase into the Phraselator, the foreign language equivalent is broadcast. The device can be used for giving orders or instructions or for asking simple questions, among other things.
It includes a database of thousands of simple phrases geared towards military needs, such as “Do not enter this area” and “Get out of the car”
The assumption is that a specific lexicon is required for specific circumstances.
One drawback - the Phraselator provides translation in one direction only. It doesn’t translate another language back into English, since the person being interviewed is not likely to respond in phrases simple enough for the computer to understand.
~~~
Fuji Xerox has released a photocopier which can take hard-copy documents of Japanese text, scan them, and deliver a translation in Chinese, English or Korean while retaining the original layout. Not just that – it works in the other direction too!
Fuji Xerox’s secret apparently lies in networking the copier to a dedicated translation server. The combination of this with algorithms that can distinguish between text and diagrams means that the finished article can retain the same page layout as the original.
You have to admire the technology but cannot fail be sceptical about the accuracy of the results.