RE Translation

[Kodack]

A development group in China has been able to use a PDA with a camera attatchment to interpret Chinese characters and give the translated output with little delay. A custom filter finds the edges of the kanji and then uses OCR to translate into romanji and from there to English. Cool stuff.

[Taro Toporific]

A development group in China has been able to use a PDA with a camera attatchment to interpret Chinese characters and give the translated output with little delay. A custom filter finds the edges of the kanji and then uses OCR to translate into romanji and from there to English. Cool stuff.

"Cool stuff"?
I'd call it "Hot stuff"! The processing load of that PDA's camera filters, semi-realtime Kanji OCR and semi-realtime machine translation would make that Chinese PDA at great personal spaceheater for those cold Jan. days.

Seriously, OCR and machine translation needs a CPU that runs faster than 500 mhz and the resulting output would still be humorous. I worked on several machine translation (MT) projects over the years, the MT output never fails to amuse . . .

Consider this philosophical insight from Kenkyusha's J-to-E Dictionary.

in'you (noun)
1. the (interacting) principles of Yin and Yang] principles.
2. pubic hair.

[Kodack]

I didn't say "real time" I said "little delay". It exists and there is a working prototype. Carnegie Mellon University's robotic development department is working on it. You can read the whole story on wired.com

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,55681,00.html


Or the research white paper

http://www.is.cs.cmu.edu/papers/speech/ICASSP02/icassp02_yang.pdf

It doesn't take that much to apply an edge filter to a 320x240 image and feed the output into an OCR module before the romanized output is translated. I personally believe that the average traveler will have real time translation through portable devices in the next 10 years.

Whether or not we will have "intelligent translation" in the next 50 years I can't say. Lets just say that human interpreters aren't going anywhere.