I will definitely use this when traveling.
For those who would use it while travelling abroad, keep it mind this requires an Internet connection. In China, you would need VPN since Google services are blocked.
Audio translation and TTS works offline if you have the proper languages downloaded, but being able to detect what language is being spoken seems to be an online-only feature.
You actually have to translate both sentences into English to understand how they somewhat mean the same thing when taken literally (but that's just the same problem as on translate.google.com)
You might prefer to say "imperfect" instead of "perfectible". While "perfectible" is a, well, perfectly good word, it is unusually rare enough that I thought you had meant to say "perfect" and made an error. "imperfect" is much more common and less likely to be misinterpreted. Apologies for the unsolicited criticism but I really was confused by this at first.
Translation is difficult, and at least in this case the translation is an accurate one (albeit one many english speakers would need to look up in a dictionary).
I guess it sounds a bit weird even in my mother tongue.
It's hard to train for all n^2 language pairs, so MT systems usually back off to English as a pivot language. i.e., they'll translate French --> English --> Chinese.
That's an interesting choice, because English lacks features some other languages might have, and thus you end up distorting through English. I remember considerable work from different sources a ways back toward a constructing artificial languages for this purpose so to mitigate the introduction of ambiguity by using an existing natural language as a pivot language, I'm surprised that natural language as the pivot is the state of the art (though I'm not surprised that English is the pivot language given that.)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1078
http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215
http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8206
So the total number of models is still linear with the number of languages.
I do not know whether this new generation of translation models is leveraged by the google translation app though.
Also pairs of languages for which their are big amount of parallel training data will still be favored.
wouldn't bible translations help?
- the vocabulary and topics covered in the bible is quite different from today's written and spoken text, especially phone discussions or social network messages.
- other aligned corpora such as http://www.statmt.org/europarl/ are much larger than the bible (several millions of tokens for most pairs vs less than 1 million for the Bible)
Agreed that http://www.statmt.org/europarl/ does not cover non-European languages.
• Word Lens: Just point your camera to a sign or text and the Translate app will instantly translate the text, even without Internet/data connection. Currently available in: English ↔ French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.
(From https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... )
I doubt this implies that the Google translation engine has been ported to work offline.
[1] http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worlds-langu...
Yeah, it is. I had pretty much the same idea a few years back, and called it "SpaceChat". I ended up dropping the project because I was too busy with other things. Smh.