If you remember back to the 1978 bestselling comedy science fiction book by Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there was a wonderful creature called the Babel Fish. It was a creature that was placed in the ear of Vogons and Betelgeusians and Humans to allow them to have clear, coherent conversations as the Babel Fish excreted a telepathic matrix into the ear of the host.

We aren’t quite at that point but the world of language translation has made leaps and bounds in recent years.

The human translation and interpreting industry generates $37 billion a year at the moment and I can see many organisations wanting a piece of that pie with their technology. There are three main areas that are being worked on as we speak.

Firstly, there are organisations dedicating themselves to live real-time translations for conferences and speeches. The communication is mostly one-way and a small delay in the translation does not create any major problems. Human translators are mainly used in this area at the moment. When I have been involved with human translators in the past, I always wonder if they translate exactly what you say. A twenty second segment of speech sometimes turns into three seconds of translated talk. Given the fact that I have no idea what the translator has said, they may have just said “that bit was boring” or worse. “He tried to be funny – laugh at his big nose.” Machine translation takes away any possibility of bias introduced by the translator – but also introduces the possibility of a misinterpretation by not picking up on nuances or ambiguity.

The second area is in written translations. This is an area that we often find amusing when we read the instructions that come with products manufactured in other countries. I once saw some noodles that proudly stated that “Our food is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.” I can only assume they wanted to say the food was safe for pregnant women. Some of these interpretations are mildly amusing but when it comes to legal contracts or more detailed instructions, misinterpretations can mean loss of money or even loss of life. The organisation that can produce high-quality text translations that are accurate will take over this space. One trick I find amusing is to write a paragraph of normal English and use a tool to translate it into a foreign language and then use a different tool to translate it back into English. Then compare what you see to the original text. 

The third area that is expanding rapidly is the social translation market. There are new apps almost every day that allow the traveller to explore countries never before considered. One company recently released a set of earpieces that allows two people to communicate back and forth in different languages in the best interpretation of the Babel Fish yet. It does have the limitation that only those two can be in a conversation but it is a first step. There are a huge number of apps available – such as SayHi; Google Translate; iTranslate; Voice Translator; iHandy Translator; Worldictionary and the list goes on. If you are travelling overseas, do a quick search and experiment with a few.

They have certainly come a long way since 2009. I was in Paris in April that year when swine flu hit the world. On the morning I had to fly out, I woke up with a temperature and airports were being very conservative in allowing people to fly, so I had to see a doctor. With no ability to communicate with the French doctor, I pulled out my computer and went to an early version of Google Translate. I typed in that I needed to be cleared of swine flu so I could fly later that day. He looked at my translation – and then at me - and typed in a message that was translated back and asked me to remove my shoe so he could examine my toe!

Maybe I should still learn another language after all.

Mathew Dickerson