Jim, I've lost my Universal translator!

Mon Jul 28 17:18:42 GMT 2003

While this article describes translation of written works:

Romancing the Rosetta Stone

it is obvious that the same technique could be applied to the spoken word as well. Given enough memory and cpu power (which of course is always getting bigger, cheaper and faster), you could load up a language translator modeled after this with all manner of regional dialects, accents and varying pronounciations and end up with something not quite as good as Star Trek's Universal Translator, but pretty darn close.

Powerful stuff. It will be interesting to see how well these kinds of things work out. Language translation has been one of the toughest computer tasks to crack, but this sounds like the right way to do it.

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