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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I was watching a graphic novel on YouTube yesterday that was translated from Japanese text into an English narration. It was weird, not perfect, probably copyright infringement, but pretty effective. I think it’s only a matter of time until we have real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling, or heck, working in another country where you don’t speak the local language. Language barriers are going to fall quickly.

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The auto-dubbing on youtube has the classic hallmark of an AI product: you can't turn it off easily.

(the audio track switcher, which will give you back the original audio, is not available on mobile. Fortunately if you use newpipe it is ..)

> real time local translator hardware that we can just plug in our ear when traveling

These are definitely already a thing, popular in Asian countries. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008777097933.html

They could even make it fish-shaped!

If they don’t, I will.

It's no doubt possible to have translation with less lag on average than current tools like Google Translate's Conversation Mode, but truly real-time translation is impossible because of word order differences. You can't translate a word you haven't heard yet.

But truly realtime translation is rarely (never?) critical. For streamed media there is usually enough of a buffer to handle word order swaps without delay (although one can make contrived counter-examoles), and for human interactions that delay is likely less than normal human processing time.

Reminds me of a letter to the Times regarding German word order (and the fact that the verb often comes last)

> Sir, Your reader's reference to German word order reminds me of a UN meeting at which I worked when the German delegate ranted for ages while all French eyes turned to the French interpreter booth. The interpreter witheringly interjected "j'attends le verbe".

Have you seen Soniox? They support real-time translation (only speech to text translation for now).

https://soniox.com/

(disclaimer: I worked there)

You know someone will figure out how to do real time translation and use the same voice as the speaker, or if you have a room with more than speaker, rather than figure out who you are listening to, just do them all and remix according to how the input sources were mixed.

There was just a demo for this posted like a week or two ago between an English and Korean speaker, I'll see if I can find it and edit/comment again.

I wonder how well that will work given the differences in grammar and word order. I have seen a similar solution applied between English and Japanese, which has a similar grammar to Korean, and the results were... not impressive.

"Watching" a graphic novel??

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