The conversation feature is pretty phenomenal, and comes close to a true Babelfish device. I just tried it with English<->Mandarin with my wife (we both speak fluently), and works pretty accurately and is fast.
I just tried English<->Mandarin with my wife...though not always grammatically correct, it gets the point across.
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.
WordLens works offline without any additional downloads, at least for the languages I tried (Spanish, French, English).
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.
Baidu translate works great in China and will translate anything you copy to the clipboard automatically. Requires the usual insane Chinese app permissions so Xprivacy or something similar is a must.
It is really perfectible for French<->Mandarin at least.
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)
> It is really perfectible for French<->Mandarin at least.
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.
It sounds strange in english. Saying "c'est perfectible" in french is correct and usual. It is translated by google translate into "This is perfectible". As usual, google translate is very poor.
The irony being the poster above used that exact translation themselves?
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 don't know whether they have a specific French <--> Chinese model. They might, they might not.
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.
New neural machine translation architectures are experimenting with pairs of neural encoders / decoders, one pair for each language and a shared language independent vector space for the meaning of all words:
- 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)
> so MT systems usually back off to English as a pivot language
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.)
• 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.
The live video translation was a startup that they acquired ("Word Lens"). It already worked offline so it would be strange if they had removed that feature.
I doubt this implies that the Google translation engine has been ported to work offline.
It does and has for some time[1]. Just switch to airplane mode and try it before asserting this? You have to download the language packs first, but it works.
The translation quality won't be (anywhere near) as good offline as online, but it works well enough for word lens to be useful without a data connection!
They've been able to do offline voice-to-text, for English at least, for the last 1-2 years, so it's possible. But I would tend to agree...seems doubtful that they could have best-in-class real-time translations....offline, right?
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.
I will definitely use this when traveling.