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Speak It in Chinese, Hear It in English.
Byline: Benjamin Sutherland
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 heldheld 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. Governments 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 a[logical not]10 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's Lecture Translator 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.
DaimlerChrysler, another grantee, is perfecting an antidote to those goofy-looking headphones on display in places like the United Nations. Its ceiling-mounted "audio-beam" speakers can shoot a cone of sound five meters to areas as small as a single seat. Bernard Smith, ...
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