Google Translate is a very useful tool for when you are travelling internationally but sadly, that’s also the time when you are least likely to have an always-on connection to the Internet. Obviously, there are a number of offline translation apps available, but if you are partial to Google Translate and you use an Android phone, you’ll be happy to hear that the latest version of the… → Read More
Rev.com, a freelancer marketplace founded by early oDesk employees, is today announcing $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Venky Ganesan of Globespan Capital Partners. Also participating in the round were Craig Sherman (former COO of Ancestry.com) and Austin Ligon (founder of CarMax). All three are now members of Rev.com’s board of directors, following the round which closed back in… → Read More
Google Translate just added a cool new feature that allows you to easily create a personalized phrasebook with the phrases and sentences you want to memorize and/or find yourself translating repeatedly. As the Google Translate team notes in today’s announcement, the idea here is to allow you to jumpstart the process of committing the translation to memory by “allowing you to save the… → Read More
YouTube just announced that it has partnered with Gengo and Translated.net, two popular translation services, to give its users a more streamlined process to get their video captions translated by professionals. Publishers can start the translation process from the YouTube interface, get estimates for how long the translation will take and how much it will cost, but they will still need to… → Read More
Google just launched an update to Google Translate that brings a few new features to the tool that will make it easier to decide which translation of a given word is the one you’re looking for. → Read More
A lot of mobile language software wants to be the equivalent of an automatic universal translation app, listening to spoken phrases and translating them using natural language processing and audio recognition, but we’re not there yet. Enter Mantaphrase, a startup with a vision of quick, focused conversations across languages that help travellers get exactly the info they need quickly. → Read More
Open English, as its name might suggest, is an online learning platform that helps non-English speakers learn the language and speak fluently. After developing the foundation for Open English in his home country of Venezuela in 2006, Andres Moreno took his idea north to Florida, where he launched the program commercially in 2008. Since then, Open English has flourished. Today, the startup employs… → Read More
Tonight, President Obama will give his 2012 State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. The annual address, which will take place Tuesday night at 9pm EST/6pm PST (watch it online at Whitehouse.gov here), is expected to include Obama’s mission going forward and his central focus as president, which he’s said is “rebuilding an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility… → Read More
Remember Word Lens? That crazy, awesome mobile application that translated words inside of images, like road signs, posters, menus, and the like, from Spanish to English (and vice versa)? Well, now the app has added a third language to its repertoire: French. With the most recent app update, Word Lens can translate from English to French and back again, but not between French and Spanish. → Read More
Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has developed a real-time Japanese <-> English translation service for mobile phones, the first of its kind. The way it works is that you speak something into the device and wait to hear a voice interpretation of what you just said in another language.
As you can see in the videos embedded below, the service, which uses the cloud for the heavy… → Read More
The idea of translating spoken language from cell phone to cell phone isn’t exactly new, but the mobile simultaneous translation system NTT Docomo is currently working on looks really impressive. Japan’s biggest mobile carrier says it uses the “best technologies” for voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis out there for its solution. → Read More
It makes a lot of sense, but it seems to be hard to realize: Using the cell phone for instant voice translation of basic sentences whenever you’re in a foreign country. But Toshiba is one of the companies working on this, and apparently they’re almost ready to offer a decent solution.
Their translation software, in its current iteration, enables cell phones to interpret between English, Chinese… → Read More
Can you even imagine what it must have been like to be an early explorer? Like, you leave Spain or Portugal on some rickety boat, and arrive in the New World. Cool and all, but, outside of shooting everything in sight, how do you communicate with anybody? What, do you point to the sun and say “sol,” and expect the other guy to repeat “sol”? That can’t be an efficient way to learn a… → Read More
Boy howdy could I use this thing at CEATEC today. Running on a Windows Mobile handheld, Toshiba has a real-time voice translation demonstration. It worked quite well. How much longer until we get the Star Trek universal translators? Video inside! → Read More
Oh boy, I gotta see this. Sprint’s offering its new “WebCapTel” service to people who don’t have trouble speaking but might be a little hard of hearing. The basic idea is pretty simple. You sign up for the service and register your phone number at SprintCapTel.com and when someone calls you, you can log into the site and have what they’re saying automatically… → Read More
Get the hell outta here. Special iPod software that our soldiers use to communicate with Arabic- and Kurdish-speaking people will be made available to regular Joe-Jobbers like you and me soon. That’s quacktastic. Here’s more from Computerworld… For example, soldiers can show Iraqi citizens a photo of a terrorist, and the iPod says in Arabic, “have you seen this… → Read More
A couple years ago, I became a member of a crowdsourcing outfit called Cambrian House just as it was getting started. The premise of the site is basically that you submit an idea for some sort of web-based service and then other members of the site vote on your idea. The best ideas get funded and then you can work on certain projects and gain a percentage of whatever profit the idea makes based on… → Read More
Looks like HP is getting together with South Korean company Mouscan (Mouscan?) to move us one step closer to that universal translator that’s in every sci-fi story since that sci-fi part of the bible. They call it the Voiscan. HP is contributing the ability to put together a single document by waving a camera over it, and Mouscan is bringing its optical character recognition skillz to the… → Read More
The Tower of Babel translator is a prototype translation device that functions in a completely different fashion from existing translators. Rather than having users punch in words on a keypad and then get back a computery sounding voice, the Tower of Babel works by hooking electrodes to the users face. The electrode are able to monitor facial expressions and then issue translations when it… → Read More
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