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Portable Translator Devices? 84

Posted by Cliff from the the-universal-translators-of-tomorrow? dept.
Roger Binns asks: "I've been looking for an electronic language translator device (like a personal organiser form factor) that can do English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Unfortunately, they are extremely difficult to find on the Web, and the ones I have seen at airports are very expensive and tend to only do one non-English language." Cool idea. Where can one buy something like this? If I ever get the time to go to Europe, I would love to take along something like this. The potential for such a device is staggering.
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Portable Translator Devices? More

Portable Translator Devices?

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  • Sony have just such a device - I have a "Sony Genius" English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary. It is a clamshell device with a biggish LCD display and a reasonable sort of keyboard, chiclet style. The coolest part is that it plays mini 3" CD & CD-ROM! I have played singles (common in Japan apparently) and they sound funny on the tiny included speaker but the headphone socket is as good as a CD walkman. It doesn't play regular CDs.

    With the unit came a two CDs, one english-kapanese and another japanese-english. Also there was a catalog of books on CD. Pictured are some "3-language" dictionaries, with various combinations of english/french/german/spanish/japanese/whatever. I don't think Sony intend this as a global product, so you probably will only find it on their Japanese site, but the model number is DD-150. I bought the cheaper version - could have paid much more for a better screen, keyboard, etc. The cost was around $200.

    It is mainly useful for me in learning Japanese, it is much better than a paper book as you can "spell" kanji using hiragana and see if they come out right. I'm still looking for a solution where I can input kanji and get hiragana or even english out - but if I knew the reading of the kanji to input it I wouldn't need that.

  • ..or the Palm VII (Score:3)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Saturday May 06, 2000 @04:10PM (#1087498)
    Every fly-by-night electronics store in New York (and doubtless other immagrant meccas like L.A.) sells no-name handheld translation gadgets. Typically they only do a word (cheap) or sentence ($200 or so) at a time, not whole passages. You can get them with one language or with a bunch at once. Some have speech synthesis.

    If you have a Palm handheld with a fair amount of RAM (8MB), there are a fair number of translation dictionaries out there. They're all one-word-at-a-time, though, so one of the better dedicated handheld gadgets will serve you better.

    Or, as long as you stay in North America (whoops! not so good for travel!) you could get a Palm VII or get a Palm III or V with a snap-on wireless modem and use the GO Network translator, for which there is a query app that handles the usual 4 or 5 European languages.
  • franklin makes thse. they even make one that will speak the words. they are all english to , but they have removable cards so you can get a card for each language you need.. if you needed to translate between two non english languages, i don't think the franklin will do it.

  • Here is what I would suggest (and I use all this stuff in day-to-day life, so it is quite usable)

    • Palm Vx (small, light, fast, tonnes of memory)
    • Dictionary from evolutionary.net [evolutionary.net]. This is modular, so you can do many languages at once, including all of the ones you mentioned. It is shareware, but I seem to rememember the fee being pretty small.
    • Also, you can replace the default calculator with Currency Calculator [www.benc.hr] which is a full featured calculator that can do arbitrary conversions

  • OOG TEST OUT TRANSLATOR!!! (Score:5)

    by OOG_THE_CAVEMAN ( 165540 ) on Saturday May 06, 2000 @12:19PM (#1087501)
    OOG STEAL TRANSLATOR FROM COMPANY, SO OOG SEE IF SPANISH WORK ON TRANSLATOR THROUGH TESTING VIA SLASHDOT POSTING:

    OOG ESCRIBE ESTE PÁRRAFO EN ESPAÑOL!!! A OOG LE GUSTA APLASTAR LAS CABEZAS CON LOS DISCOS COMPACTOS DE FUENTE ABIERTA!!! A OOG TAMBIÉN LE GUSTA FUMAR LA MARIGUANA DE CUEVA, BEBIR LA CERVEZA DE CUEVA, Y CHINGAR A LAS MUJERES DE CUEVA!!! OOG COME MUCHAS CABEZAS DE LOS PECES!!! PERO LA PERSONAS QUE A OOG NO LE GUSTAN SON TODOS LOS ÁRBITROS QUE NO ENTENDEN A OOG Y JUZGAN QUE LOS PÁRRAFOS DE OOG SON EXAGERADO (PORQUE NO TIENEN UN RAZÓN BIEN PARA SU MODERANDO MAL!!!) SI OOG JAMÁS ENCONTRA A UN DE LOS ÁRBITROS MALES, OOG LE DARÍA UN GOLPE EN EL CULO!!!

    OOG HAVE SUCCESS!!! TRANSLATOR WORK WELL FOR OOG!!! AND NO ACCUSE OOG OF USING BABELFISH, OOG ACTUALLY HAVE SENSE!!!

  • Well, I think "useless" is a little strong. I wouldn't use babelfish for any sort nuanced translation, but if all you want is to get the gist of a new story, I think it's fairly useful.


    --

  • What a pleasure to read a comment that uses correct spelling and grammar! Even the serial comma (n objects in a list, n-1 commas) and hyphenation are correct!
  • portable universal translators? on early 21st century earth? wouldn't the ahistorical introduction of such a device be a violation of the Prime Directive so severe that it would necessitate the intervention of the Temporal Police?
  • There's a really cool web page translator that one of the guys at work uses on his Russian Seattle [russianseattle.com] web site. It translates the whole web site, with one of the best accuracy rates I've seen, and let's you follow the web links too.

    It's provided by a Russian company, according to Alex.

  • You know (s)he's right? There are a hell of a lot more of us (Americans) then them (English), the (American) revolutionary war was more than 200 years ago. Isn't it about time we start saying that we speak "American", and guess what, so do the English, albeit a bastardized, limey version of it! Hah! :)

    Just to be clear, I'm only saying this in jest. I noticed somebody posted that a wireless device that worked only in the US wasn't much good for travel. Well, that's a US-centric view. It's great for those who are travel(l)ing to the U.S.

    Seriously though, as far as language is concerned I think the internet is only the latest technology, joining radio and TV, in the massive spread of English. It appears to me languages are dying faster than they are being invented. At some point, (may be 1000s of years from now) there will be the final showdown between English and Chinese. Either that, or we'll blast ourselves back into the stone age, and and new languages will evolve in post-civilization isolation like giant tortoises on the Galapagos.

    As an aside, in the "battle" between English and Chinese, on the internet at least, English has the decided advantage, (perhaps this is obvious) with it's 26 character alphabet vs. the multi-thousand character (pseudo)ideograms of Chinese.

    That, and from my perspective at least, it appears that there are way more Chinese speaking people learning English, than English speaking people speaking Chinese. However, this may be just a circumstance of where I happen to live. (in the U.S.) But, I don't think so. What American high-school student is given the opportunity to learn (any kind of) Chinese? Practically none, this, despite the fact that more people of the Earth speak Chinese (of some kind) than any other language(s) of the world. Yet almost every high school offers a French course. Who speaks French? The French, the Belgians...etc. 1.2 billion people speak Chinese of some kind. Why is our educational system so arranged? Rather fortunate for all those people that speak only one language, there's a word for them, I forget, mono-...mono-something...no wait, it's "Americans" that's what they call those people.

    (BTW, I'm an American) and (to be redundant) am fluent in only one natural language (not counting pig-latin :).

  • The BIG problem is that no one has cracked the whole language problem so translation remains a very sketchy affair, typically a few coherent words, maybe a phrase or two occasionally a sentence comes out cogently. Nothing more even from the best of these systems.
    There's a guy at MIT called Chomsky who's gummed up the whole works on computer based translation for over 30 years. He and his minions conduct character assasination on anyone who dares to do linguistics differently than them. Unfortunately, until that old man dies, a practical computer translation device is something you can keep wishing for but will never get.

  • Re:Problems w/ translators (Score:3)

    by heidiporn ( 152250 ) on Sunday May 07, 2000 @11:23AM (#1087508)
    I will post this in case anyone else can benefit from it...

    My Spanish-English dictionary of choice -- I am practically in love with it-- is _The Oxford Spanish Dictionary_ (1994). Why do I adore it so? It is nearly 2000 pages of Spanish/English goodness, including >275,000 words/phrases, >450,000 translations, verb tables (every single verb in the dictionary is matched to a particular conjugation pattern found at the back of the book), aid with correspondence, weights and measures conversions, and lots of other helpful features.

    My favorite thing about this dictionary, however, is its inclusion of regional idioms and slang. Spanish varies markedly between countries, and this dictionary includes a tremendous number of those regional distinctions. For example, "chamaco" is a Mexican word meaning "boy" or "kid"... Though it is found only in the vocabulary of one Spanish-speaking country, it is included in the dictionary with the annotation "(Méx fam)," indicating that it is a familiar (as opposed to formal) Mexican expression. The same is done for regionalisms of Central America, the Caribbean, the Southern Cone, Spain, and all the other Spanish-speaking countries/regions.

    As you can see, I could go on all day about this, but I will spare you...

    The _Oxford_ dictionary definitely has French, Italian, German, and Russian counterparts, which I imagine are equally comprehensive. I'd be willing to wager they also offer comparable dictionaries in other languages. (Try looking here [oup-usa.org].) The dictionaries run somewhere in the vicinity of $45, and they are well worth the price.

    I have yet to find a truly comprehensive Brazilian Portuguese or Hebrew dictionary, but, then, I haven't really looked very hard. If anyone knows of one, let me know. (You can use heidipom@hotmail.com for now, as I will be switching ISPs shortly.)

    I hope that from this long-winded explanation you were able to derive some substantial content. :)

  • If you read the MAY mag from Wired they basically say that context is the ultimate problem. Even with people-2-people contact context can be lost from one to another. Context is lost in writing and reading. Context can only be gathered from direct contact and even then it isn't perfect. (SEE MALE/FEMALE RELATIONS) The situation dictates. Software translation will only be available when technology can survey its surroundings or it sticks to specific subject content. PC can mean a few things depending where you are or who you are talking to.
  • Machine translation by its very nature sucks, and will continue to suck for the forseeable future.

    The problem isn't the technology per se; it's that constructs in one language do not necessarily map particularly well into another.

    Among western european languages, this is usually an overcomable obstacle, as they all have roughly similar grammars and vocabularies (although there are still subtleties; "embarassing" is a concept which doesn't translate well into German, for example). But when you get outside the germanic/romance languages, it gets harder; and a mechanistic mapping of word (a) in language (b) to word (c) in language (d) will often fail to render anything intelligible.

    If you take an average web page, run it through babelfish into some other language, and then back into its original language, its meaning has often significantly degraded; do it a couple of times, and you frequently end up with something only a step above gibberish. This isn't because babelfish is lame; it's because translation is *hard*.

    That's not to say that mechanical translation isn't useful --- it's *nice* to be able to know how to say "where is the bathroom" in any language, and machines can help with that. But they won't allow you to speak a language intelligently, or make sense of the conversations around you, any more than the tiny tourist dictionaries with hundreds of phrases that you can't pronounce correctly will.

  • If you are looking for a shirt pocket travel translator thing, Franklin Electronic Publishers rules this market place.

    http://www.franklin.com, Before I go to far let me tell you I work for Franklin . I'm the guy responsible for the software in the entire pocket translator product line, I wrote it. Not the dictionaries, I've done a number of them but so have many others.

    No, I'm not the linguist who does the language stuff - they won't let me do that, they know better then that, I just do the prodcut software, simulation tools, compilers, assemblers and stuff like that.

    There are two classes of products, the shirt pocket '106' series. We also make quite a number of larger full DICTIONARY products.

    The translator product lines sell here in the states for $14.95 to $29.95 depending on the number of languages, and the store you purchase them in, and the feature set included.

    The rip-off shops in NYC charge 200 to 300% over MSRP - check out our web site.

    They all include FONETIK spell korekshun, no other pocket translator series has the depth of features the franklins have, nor the word grouping we have.

    For instance, try these things in any product: mikerowscope, noledge, phish, kawfee, backtearia, nive, see who can actually find the word you are looking for.

    Yes, we do have some competitors, they are Seiko-Epson, and Hachette and to some degree Langenshite (German outfit). Somebody mentioned LINO - they don't make anything - they just sell stuff that is done by a Taiwan out fit.

    The TWE106 has Eng/Ger/Frn/Spn/Itl, the TEE-106 (only available in europe) has English, German, Hungarian, Polish and Czech. The TEP-100 (Don't know if they are still around) has English-Portuguese. Some of the other products DLE/FLE/NLE-100 or -106 include Dutch, and/or Swedish. These small credit card sized guys include a small databank (50 to 100 names & phone numbers depending on size). And a simple calculator.

    The TRE-400 has 7 languages and a few more features.

    In heavily inflected languages, the inflections work the way you want, and would expect. English example: if you type "GO" the product knows how to find the word "WENT" also.

    The dictionaries typically include inflection screens showing word usage in simple sentences like: I run, You Run, I have Run, I ran, etc, in most cases, this is in both languages.

    Our translators - unlike the other junk ones that are out there know that a "BOOT" is the trunk of a car in [UK], and stop and ask do you want BOOT (AUTO) [UK] or BOOT (SHOE) [US] don't translate it only as a shoe or a trunk. They also know that TRUNK in (US) can mean (AUTO) or TRUNK (LARGE SUITCASE).

    Most of the German products (all translators, most dictionaries) understand compound words, ie: German, an airplane Boarding Card is boardkarte or something like that.

    The full dictionary type products are available in quite a number of languages, ie: Bi-Lingual Dictionaries and a few mono-linguals included

    Languages include: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Sweedish, Catalan, Polish, Czech, Arabic, Hebrew, just to name a few. The primary european languages are available in the US, the others - well you have to get them from the local countries. See http://www.franklin.com/international [franklin.com]

    We also have some of the best indexable text compression on the planet - that's how we can do this work.

    The little tiny pocket $15 to $30 translators are run by a 1MHZ 6502 with 2 or 3K bytes of ram and about 512K bytes of rom, and a little 2032 coin cell battery.

    The larger units run on a custom 24 bit RISC cpu that we developed in house, we have GCC & GDB ported for this custom RISC cpu.

    One thing to keep in mind when you are looking for these types of products, Franklin is the only company in the world who Designs and Develops the products *IN*HOUSE* in all aspects, ie: Hardware, Software, Compression, circuit boards you name it. Everybody else farms the work out, it shows in the product quality that you purchase.

  • I'm the engineer on the translator project for http://translator.go.com/ and I think it is better than blabberfart's! The interface to the text translations is much better. A lot of work went into URL translations to make the pages come out better. And we always had better link translations. blabberbutt programmers are struggling to keep up. Yes, it uses systrans on the back end, same as smellyfish. You can download a palm pqa for your palm vii. We even have it working on cell phones. We are working with systrans to improve the dictionaries, and we hired a phd from stanford to work on other improvements. It's Perl! mod_perl to be exact. Apache, mod_perl, slowaris.
    --
    Craig Shaver, Productivity Group
  • go here for pqa download

    http://www.palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cf m?sid=79448420000507221554&prodID=3258
    --
    Craig Shaver, Productivity Group
  • But if I just want to know what the reviewers in a certain german magazine are saying about mobo chip sets, I run the url through my trusty http://translator.go.com/ . I get the general idea and have the important information I need.

    If you are putting out a manual on your product then get a good human translation service to do it.

    If you just want to write a silly love letter to some french girl you just met on vacation -- use the go translator (http://translator.go.com !!!!)


    --
    Craig Shaver, Productivity Group
  • Great.

    First, you speak your words into a speech program that's inaccurate when it's at its best.

    Then, you take that already slightly garbled quote and then subject to another punishing round of mistakes with the translator.

    Each one boasts 90% accuracy; .9^2 = .81 or 1/5, which means you will have to fix one out of five words already. And then add to this the fact that the translator does even worse with text that's garbled to begin with.

    nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb

  • Well, they are both using Systran software... so I don't see how one could work better than the other...

    Methinks Disney's [go.com] may be using a newer version of Systran software than the version used in . [altavista.com]

  • My dream would be "Kanji Glasses", a device in the shape of glasses, where a built-in camera takes pictures of the object I view at, does pattern recognition to identify the Japanese/Chinese Kanji characters and projects the dictionary entries via the glasses to my eyes while telling me the meaning in japanese via a built in ear speaker if I look at a certain request point...
    Maybe in 10 years.

    For now I would be happy with a Sharp Zauraus, thus a kind of super Palm Pilot, where I can use a stylus to draw a Kanji character I see on its screen and it applies pattern recognition and gives a lookup from a built in dictionary. It exists in Japan, but I have no clue where to buy it in Germany.

  • I used the Seiko credit card size devices. It is useful if you know a very small amount of the language.

    One useful item that they didn't include is the part of speech. Then you know that the noun run is not the same as the verb run.

    Also the tiny keypad makes the entry inconvienent. You can't keep a conversation going, if you have to keep using this device.

  • Franklin makes a 5 language model you can find here: www.franklin.com/estore/details.asp?ID=23.

    I received one for a gift last year, but honestly haven't used it much, other than just messing around to see how it works (I guess that means it's time for an international vacation; hmmm...). My initial impressions are that it will be helpful for translating key words from menus & signs, but may be cumbersome when actually trying to talk with someone.

    Cheers,
    MJC
  • I gave both of my kids a 26 language Lingo Translator for Christmas two years ago. Only $99. http://www.4biz.com/lingo/products/index.html It is handy when you are travelling in Europe, Asia, or South America. I had planned on taking my son on a trip around the world as his graduation present by flying to Beijing and taking the Trans-Mongolian Train to Irkutsk, Russia, and then from there on the Trans-Siberian Train to Moscow and on into Berlin and Paris. There is a tour company in HongKong that handles all the red tape and getting the tickets. But the Yugoslavian War came along and suddenly it was not a good idea to go to China or Russia. We did a tour in most of Europe instead. The funny thing is that everywhere we went in Europe, most everyone knew English. Even in Paris. And the French are NOT rude. Really great people. Only a few times in Germany did I need to use my college Deutsch. And even there they spoke English in all the Internet Cafes. By the way, Internet Cafes are also great places to download your digital camera's pictures onto a Zip Drive disk or onto a R/W CD. Then your memory cards can be cleared and used again. There are also several web sites that will translate text for you by cut and paste.
  • I have attempted to use babelfish for my Spanish, Portuguese, and French translations, and I have found that you'd be much better off using a current (that is, published in the last five-or-so years), comprehensive dictionary (yes, *gasp* ...the kind with the actual pages...) for all of your translation needs. In my fairly extensive translation experience, I have found babelfish to be basically useless if one is looking to translate more than one word or a pair of words. It serves no purpose otherwise, as the word-for-word translations do not lend themselves to the interpretation of idioms, expressions, or even alternate meanings of words. As for the guy who wants to travel Europe, it might be best to invest in some portable language dictionaries.
  • I wonder what a successful portable translator will do to the translating business? When do you think humans will be replaced by machines in this field too?

    Sure, Babelfish [altavista.com] is rather choppy, but I've seen it translate some paragraphs rather well. Thoughts?
  • We need them in the drive thrus.
  • These were sold in the US as the Sony Data Discman in the early 90s. They can be easily found on eBay.

    ObBC: Someone with a few of these on hand should make a Beowulf cluster out of them.
  • Uh, try the palm pqa for http://translator.go.com please, please, please ..... my job depends on it! a go engineer :)
    --
    Craig Shaver, Productivity Group
  • Please run it through the go translator. http://translator.go.com/

    Back and forth, back and forth, and while you are at it click on a couple of the ads .... :)

    The GoTransEngr ...


    --
    Craig Shaver, Productivity Group
  • Radio Shack [radioshack.com] can order any of the lingo series of translators for decent prices, some have a text to speech converter to help with pronunciation. Most Radio Shack salespeople dont know they exist however, just ask to see the home office section in the RSU catalog(a 2 foot wide catalog, usually installed near the counters)
  • In attition to the Electronic Book Player line, Sony also sells a smaller "business card case size" DD-IC100 model. It of course lacks CD-ROM support and there is no way to change out the dictionaries, but as a simple J->E E->J dictionary, it's great. And it's so small, you can take it pretty much anywhere. The only thing it lacks is a Japanese-Japanese dictionary and a kanji-lookup dictionary (which I think the DD-150 and up have).

    And of course, as someone else mentioned, the Sharp Zaurus (PI is the type of processor I think) is great for doing kanji lookups, as one of the many input methods it offers is the ability to recognize a character that you write on the screen. Just be careful, at least one model does not have the dictionary software (the "iGet" models with the iMac-looking colors. The black "business" version does include the dictionary).

  • Yes! Yes! Yes!

    The GoTranslator at http://translator.go.com/ is better!

    Better interface, better URL page translations.
    And we are working overtime to make it better still.

    Oh, and while you are there please click on the ads.

    thank you thank you thank you


    --
    Craig Shaver, Productivity Group
  • uh not really i've been in europe and even in the big cities many many people DON'T speak English

    I respectfully disagree. I've lived in Europe for 34 years and have always been able to get around speaking English. Just curious, what big cities have you been to where people don't speak English?

    and anyway, what's the point of going to a foreign country to speak English? trying to communicate in a foreign language is half the fun!

    Absolutely agree, but a portable language translator will not help you much there. Learning another language takes time and a lot of practice. As you mention, the most fun part of that is actually trying to communicate with people in another language. Three months in another country will teach you more than 3 years in school.

  • The problem isn't dictionary availability, or words changing their meanings, there are several problems that cannot be solved with a pure dictionary based system. The first is that natural languages, and English in particular, rely on context to make ambigious words non-ambigious.

    If I give the translation system the text "Pick up the lead." it doesn't know if I mean a cable, or a base metal.

    The second problem is that words which are equvilant in one language are not neccessarily the same in other languages. For example in english, a book can either be a printed work, or a ledger of business transactions.

    A third problem is that phrases generally do not translate. If you translate the phrase "Throw the book at him" directly into a non english language, you may well get something which has translated perfectly, but is understood totally differently.

    None of these problems are totally unsolvable, but they need a good NLP in order for the computer to truely understand the text before attempting to translate it.

  • If I recall correctly, the last time I went through my local Office Max, I was astounded to find that they had quite a variety of these devices. There was even one that had interchangable/upgradable language cartridges, and would speak the sentences for you.
    I would definately suggest going to any local chain-based brick&mortar retail office supply/electronics store to look at what's available, play with the demos, and then go home and online to find the best price on those models you prefer.
  • That's what I mean. Having multiple contributors from each language add to the translation dictionaries would allow you to use both single words and mutliple-word phrases for translation.

    That way you could have an entry: "Throw the book at them" = "Prosecute to the fullest extent" and THEN translate it. It would take a lot of work to get the right basic system down, but once you did, some sort of distributed entry system with peer review would allow you to keep up with rapidly changing areas of language. The pool of idiomatic expressions we use in the US is hell for any non-native speaker to navigate, and since English is currently the world's common language for business purposes, having a translator that kept current would be of great benefit to others.



    -jpowers
    You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...
  • Well, babelfish.altavista.com [altavista.com] works pretty well, for a website at least.(even though your looking for more of an organizer type thing). The problem I've found when using these is that they are too literal, exact translations.
  • I'm fairly certain you can get translating software for your palm device for most languages. check on PalmGear HQ [palmgear.com] to see if they have what you need.
  • Well, they are both using Systran software... so I don't see how one could work better than the other...
  • There was a bunch of different language translators for the Gameboy about ten years ago...
  • I find that translator.go.com [go.com] works better than altavista. Just me...
  • Are you looking for a Babelfish-like translator, with sentence to sentence translation? Or is an English-Insert Language Here-English dictionary enough? I know the Palm OS platform (Palm, Handspring, and TRG) have some excellent examples of the latter. They might have some of the former as well. Search for "dictionary" or "translation" at Palmgear [palmgear.com]. HTH
  • one that translated klingon!


    One Microsoft Way

  • Re:sigh (Score:1)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    I'm afraid the English would disagree that Americans speak English...

  • Hmm... (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    I knew a boy from Taiwan who came over here maybe 8 years ago, and he had a device that had an integrated TI-81, currency converter, TaiwaneseEnglish dictionary, etc., etc.

    A quick search should turn up some results, though; I found Lingo [lingotalk.com] easily enough.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • CPen (Score:3)

    by mats ( 155 ) on Saturday May 06, 2000 @11:24AM (#1087543) Homepage
    CPen (http://www.cpen.com [cpen.com]) is very portable and very cool. It is big as a highlight pen and you scan a word in the same manner as you would with a highlighter. It comes with one dictionary but you can buy them also. It also beams text to and from PalmPilots and Laptops using IR. Also contains an address book.
  • I main gripe of translate are the accurate of information it give. I first one bad translate did but now I having much betterer one. It had translate this one and it do good!

    Serious, some person complaining too much about translate but I am seeing none problems. It look goodly to I.

    nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
  • true, but the problem with dictionaries is that they do not usually conjugate verbs for you.
  • They've had these around for a long time. I remember seeing ones years ago that could do four languages (not sure how well they worked, though) and were about the size of a large calculator. I think Franklin was the most popular brand.
  • an open-source type project. If you could come up with a good enough basic translation system, you could take dictionary updates from everywhere, so the software would keep up with the languages involved. What good's a little box that translates Japanese to English, when words and phrases move in and out of use so quickly in the two languages you end up with Babelfish-type results. Without tons of people working on something like this continuously you'll need new equipment every year, and like you said, it's not cheap.

    -jpowers
    You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Ranma 1/2 When...

  • found the link (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I knew I saw something like this on slashdot before. Here's the link [slashdot.org].
  • Such a device has been around for centuries. Its called "a wallet full of cash".
  • Got mine at a rand macnally store in a mall, Im sure there webbound too. Mine does like 14 languages. They have a few different models each with a different set of languages. Price was around 50 bucks for like 20K words in each. Enough to get you to the bathroom in alot of place. Fortunatly it does english to english cause i get confused alot when i leave the US and go to the UK.
  • This months issue of Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/current.html) is devoted to MT.Some interesting articles and interviews, check it out.
  • You could probably just spend those 10 years learning Japanese. You'll undoubtedly end up a lot better than it will, too.
  • I was just talking about this yesterday. A good palm pilot with web access and a bookmark for babelfish.altavista.com should do the trick.
  • Oui oui oui, je sais que une multitude de personnes signalant sur Slashdot ont déjà fait à ce jour quelques choses avec le babelfish, mais diable?

    C'est une idée très intéressante, mais car nous tous nous rendons compte cela ne fonctionne parfaitement jamais. Au centre de Carnegie Mellon pour la traduction automatique [cmu.edu] ils contrôlent quelques choses très intéressantes, mais égalisent la technologie est toujours de base et imparfait.

    Est-ce que mais que je sais? Je vais de nouveau à manger un croissant avec Le Pape.
  • This is all well and good, but how long until someone maliciously puts out a translator that mistranslates.... ;)
  • My initial impressions are that it will be helpful for translating key words from menus & signs, but may be cumbersome when actually trying to talk with someone.

    And that just about sums it up. There's a lot of discussion here about technical aspects of language translation (nerds, oops, that includes myself...), but these translation devices will be mostly useless. For those of you who don't have a passport, most of Europe actually speaks English, and I don't mean Great Britain and Ireland. Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden: just about everyone has a good knowledge of English. Germany, Norway, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria: most people speak enough English to help you find your hotel. France: special case, they actually do speak English, but they won't, since they think the rest of the world should speak French...(I'm half joking). As for other parts of the world (Asia, Africa, etc.), same story: you should be able to find an English speaking person quite easily.

    Anyway, a multi-lingual organizer will do you no good if a traffic cop stops you and does not speak English, nor will it help you pick up someone in a bar. So, as was mentioned, nice for translating street signs and the like, but you might as well use a dictionary for that.

  • Any recommendations for good quality dictionaries?

    (Would have sent this via email, but you don't give an address... feel free to reply to mine.)
  • If you go to europe and stay in the neighbourhood of (relatively ;-) large cities, you don't need a translator. These days almost everyone speaks english (especially in the more touristic areas). If you go to (for example) the Netherlands, you will notice that the people are very helpfull if you speak english
  • I only want one if the guys from Tai Seng who subtitle Jet Li movies design it.

  • I am learning Japanese.

    Problem is that if you don't use the language (or rather: written language in this case) regulary, you forget. And one is usually very seldom opposed to that language in Germany.

    It is interesting to see Japanese folks who live here to use a kanji dictionary when they write a post card. So they suffer the same.

  • The problem with most machine translation is that it is very little more than a search and replace of one set of words with another. The actual syntax of the language is not translated. Also, in cases where one word maps into several different words in the target language, most machine translation picks the most common usage, which (due to Murphy) is not what's needed. For example, if I ask for source, does that mean "(nominally) human readable instructions for a computer)", "origin of a comment", "part of a MOSFET transistor where the majority charge carriers are injected", or what?


    Also, little subtlies of the language get lost, for example translating "you" into French, do you use "vous" (you, formal reference, used for people you either don't know or people you should show respect to) or "tu" (you, informal reference, like you'd use for your buddy).


    However, if both parties know the machine is translating, and accept the ungrammatical output and work around it, machine translation sure can help.

  • Franklin [franklin.com] has been making devices like this for years. If they weren't the first to do it, I'd be surprised. I've never used one myself, but they've been around so long (10 years??) that their technology must be pretty mature.

    They also have a ton of other cool PDA-form-factor devices. Definitely the gadget-geek should check them out.


    --

  • I have a device exactly like the one you are looking for. It does French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. It also stores a list of common phrases in each language. It also has a horoscope function :) I'm not sure what company makes it, but it was fairly cheap (~$30 if I remeber correctly). The only thing it says on it is 'MODEL 3818'. I hope that helps you out. Good luck finding what you are looking for.
  • Found it... Here's one for 25 bucks that can do phrases in Spanish, French, German, and Italian: http://www.franklin.com/estore/de tails.asp?ID=23 [franklin.com]
  • Yo soy norteamericano y hablo español y un poco de francés. Y no, no soy latino.

  • The Lingo [lingotalk.com] line of personal translators is IMHO excellent. Depending on your needs, there's everything from the Lingo 26 that supports , you guessed it, 26 international languages, to the Lingo 6Talk and Lingo phrase which pronounce the words themselves. There are also versions of the translator designed for specific areas of the world. I bought my grandfather a Lingo Continental for his birthday and it's been indespensable in his travels.

  • Couldn't some software be made for a Palm Computer to handel this? Seems like a good idea, you could cut down on the amount of hardware you'd need on a trip....

    Wiwi
    "I trust in my abilities,
  • I've heard some fairly good things about the Quicktionary [quickwiz.com]. According to the website, it is able to do multiple languages -- they say there are models available for 25 different languages. It looks like a big pen, and you scan it over the text you want to translate. It even has something so that you can write out words for it to translate (I think it uses magnetized letters) if the original text is too big. The prices on their site range from $200-$230.
  • learning the swear words for every language. At least something useful did come out of high school :X

    English: Fry's 30 day money back guarentee

  • Idea (Score:2)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 )
    Imagine this. You take some voice recognition software (ViaVoice perhaps) and put it into a Palm-size recorder. When the language comes in, it processes it through a translator, either a program or even something rudimentary, like Babelfish. Automatic language detection would be kind of tough, but you could easily tell it what language to expect by the country that you are in. I don't see why all of this can't be done with a Palm-size device and a wireless connection.

    Yes, your translations would be rough, but they'd get the job done. I've translated entire articles using Babelfish for research and the main ideas come across. I don't see why something like this can't exist right now.
  • Oh comment j'aime Babelfish...

    Yes yes yes, I know that a multitude of people announcing on Slashdot already to date made some things with the babelfish, but devil?

    It is a very interesting idea, but because we all we return account that perfectly never functions. In the center of Carnegie Mellon for machine translation [cmu.edu] they control some very interesting things, but equalize technology is always basic and imperfect.

    But what I know? I again will eat a crescent with the Pope.

  • Sharp PI (Score:1)

    by dcs ( 42578 )
    Sharp has handheld devices that will let you input kanji and get both hiragana and english out of it. Actually, the devices do a LOT more than that, of course. :-) I have an old model, PI-7000, which has been phased out already. It's about 15x9cm, and has a plastic "pen" with which you write the characters on the screen.
  • Ah, true... I had not considered that because the dictionaries I have do indeed indicate how to conjugate each verb... I still would take a quality dictionary (one that includes conjugation keys, idiomatic expressions, street slang, etc.) over a mediocre web-based alternative any day though... (Sorry, I'm a bit of a language aficionado, so this is an area of particular interest to me :))
  • Wired Magazine [wired.com] actually has a story this month [wired.com] on next generation translation devices.
    Interesting read.
  • There are plenty of translator programs available for the Palm platform nowadays, and the investment in Palm hardware is better than in a dedicated translator machine.

    Check all the usual Palm websites (I don't know 'em off the top of my head), and you'll see what I mean.

    Palms are the veritable sonic screwdriver of computing. Just pick up a cheap one, buy the translator software, and leave it at that.

    (Might I suggest a Visor? http://www.handspring.com/)
  • is what we really need.. Thus, we would finally have a universial language. Furthermore, it would be just as destructive as ourselves.

  • I need a device that will allow me to understand women.

  • I doubt this is what you're looking for, but I've seen several simple electronic dictionaries that take a word from one language and give you a word back, no sentences or phrases or anything. These are mainly useful if you've taken classes in the language and need a quick reference dictionary, and are available from places like Radio Shack. I think I've even seen a few that are multilingual (sp?), but like I said, they're pretty much useless without basic knowledge of the language.
  • --------
    Point 1: Not there yet
    --------

    Even the best Machine Translation (MT) systems are only useful for what are referred to as "gyst" translations. The makers of the leading systems concede this. One (Transparent Language) says:

    "If you are going to disseminate your translation to others, you usually want a human translator to at least look it over and edit it, as in our PersonalPlus translation service level on PlusTranslation.com. If you are going to print or publish your translation, you definitely want the translation done by a competent human translator who has experience in that particular domain..."

    Another interesting commentary on this is provided by the president of the American Translator Association, in a letter to President Clinton:
    Letter to Clinton [atanet.org]

    --------
    Point 2: There's a better way
    --------

    The top level systems have extremely large databases (of vocabularies, morphologies, idioms and grammar patterns) and are not currently practical for handheld devices.

    A much better solution is using your handheld to connect to other people--people who speak the required langauges--and getting translations from intelligent human beings.

    We're working on this.

    Henry
    ProZ.com [proz.com]

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