One Step Toward a Babel Fish: Real-Time Voice Translation For Phones 131
the_newsbeagle writes "Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish, which lived in the brain and could translate any language in the universe, was so incredibly useful that it simultaneously proved and disproved the existence of God. This real-time translation app for mobile phones, offered by the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo, isn't going to freak out theologians any time soon. The company admits it has lots of work to do to improve translation accuracy, and it can currently only translate between Japanese and three languages: English, Korean, and Mandarin. But by allowing phone calls to pierce the language barrier, we just might have taken a step toward the universe that Adams envisioned: one where open communication between people of different cultures leads to an onslaught of terrible bloody warfare."
Re:Sounds like a step backwards to me (Score:5, Funny)
All your base are belong to us (Score:4, Funny)
The real question is...would it correctly translate to and from "All your base are belong to us"?
What is "correctly" in this case?
Re:not a step towards babel fish (Score:3, Funny)
Not to mention the article is talking about computers! It's not even a fish!!