News Archive / Speak, Tourist, And Software Shall Translate 21.07.2010

Soon, foreign tourists may no longer need to flip furiously through phrase books to find out where the nearest restroom is. They can simply take out their smartphones, say what they want to in their native language and then wait to hear the translation spoken back. This will be made possible by new software developed by scientists from eight Asia-Pacific countries that can provide real-time translations of English and eight Asian languages, including Indonesian.

“The speech translator software was developed to facilitate international communication between Asia-Pacific countries,” said Hammam Riza, the director of the Science and Technology Network Information Center at Indonesia’s state-run Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT).

The software, produced by the Asian Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium, can also translate Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay and English.

“It will not only translate Indonesian to Japanese, but also Japanese to Chinese and vice versa,” he said. “It has 72 combinations among the nine languages.”

Hammam said the project began in 2006. But until last year, the software could only work for three languages: Indonesian, English and Japanese. “But now we can do combinations of all nine, although it’s still limited to tourism purposes,” he said.

Once installed in a personal computer or smartphone, the software will be able to recognize spoken phrases and translate it into the desired language. At the software’s launching, Hammam demonstrated the software’s effectiveness by conducting an online conference with three friends from Japan, China and India, with all four speaking in their native languages. Their conversation was first converted into text — in the language of each speaker (so the Indian speaker, for example, only saw Hindi script on his screen). The computer then converted the written words into the spoken language of the listener. “So, yes, the computer needs to have a microphone and speakers,” Hammam said. 

Hammam said once the bugs had been ironed out, the software could be commercialized and installed on laptops, PDAs or smartphones. In the future, he said, users would not even have to buy the equipment needed to use the translation software.

source: http://thejakartaglobe.com

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