In June 2010 I
wrote a successful series of posts titled “Technologies that will change how we live,
work, play and learn”. Even though my thoughts on this are now two
years out-of-date I still think many of my observations at the time hold true.
One of my predictions was around on-line translation tools and I’ve really seen these improve in leaps and bounds since June 2010. I spent two weeks working in Eastern Europe over the October holidays (Albania, Romania and Bulgaria) and if it wasn’t for Google Translate and Bing Translator I would have really struggled to transfer the learning to the teachers I was working with.
The following YouTube clip from Microsoft Research is a really interesting step forward in real-time translation. Although it is still not 100% perfect what is interesting about it is that firstly, it is pretty good and secondly not only can it have a pretty good go at translating the spoken word into Mandarin Chinese but when it does it, it sounds like you!
The video gets off to a slow start, but if your interested in this sort of thing it is definatly worth a watch.
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