I was once told that if you knew the English, French and German languages, you could travel almost anywhere in the world and make yourself understood.
I believe it was either my French or German teacher who revealed that sage nugget of information… probably to justify their jobs.
But that seems about right, although I’d probably throw in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish for good measure, as well as Klingon just because you may want to impress that Wonder Woman cosplayer at the next ComicCon.
But thanks to the new and improved Google Translate app for your Android or Apple smartphone, there’s really no need to actually learn another language any more.
The app already let you easily translate English into something like 80 different languages just by typing or speaking a desired word or phrase into your phone. But the product was recently updated to include a conversation mode, which allows for automatic voice translation for two people speaking different languages, and the surprising Word Lens, which instantly translates text on things like street signs when you point your camera at it, overlaying the translation right onto the screen.
These enhanced features pretty much usher in the age of the “universal translator” from Star Trek that allowed Captain Kirk to communicate with, outwit or seduce the various aliens he encountered weekly without having to look through a Klingon/Earthman dictionary every two seconds to find out how to say “Let’s make sweet alien music together.”
For the conversation mode, you simply set your language choices (from, say, English to French) and say what’s on your mind. Tap on the screen and a Stephen Hawking-like voice intones what you just said, but in the new language. Then your friend can do the same, and voilà, two people who speak completely different tongues can converse with relative ease.
Word Lens is even cooler than that, though. It’s an augmented reality (AR) mode that utilizes your smartphone’s camera, and translates text in real time. Just point your camera at a sign, menu or any copy, and it instantly transforms the words of one language into another… right be fore your eyes. So basically, through your phone’s screen, you’re looking at the same sign, the same font and everything, but in a new language.
After showing this new function to people, some have actually remarked, “I know I just saw it happen, but I still kind of don’t believe it happened.”
Yeah, it’s that neat.
But that’s not to say Google Translate doesn’t have a ways to go yet.
When translating a box of crackers from French to English for me, the app changed “The cracker Canada loves to dunk in soup…” to “The crackers everyone loves to dip in soup…”
Dip. Dunk. That’s pretty close, but I’m sure even such slight nuances might possibly alter the desired meaning of a phrase.
Kirk wouldn’t get so far with the alien babe if the universal translator had altered his come-on to “Let’s produce diabetes-inducing foreign noise as a group.”
It’s still an incredibly polished, technologically advanced and pretty useful app, nonetheless, and considering it’s absolutely free to download and use, and doesn’t require WiFi to use once downloaded, everyone should have this on their smartphones.
There’s no word on when they’ll be adding Klingon as a translatable language, though, so you’ll probably want to find another way to impress at ComicCon this year.
