Google develops phone-call language translation

Google has announced ambitious plans to combine its voice recognition and text-translation software to develop a smartphone that can instantly translate foreign languages - meaning people who do not share the same tongue will be able to talk by phone.

The concept is reminiscent of the fictional 'babel fish' that appears in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The new phone is unlikely to be available any time soon, but the company says it hopes to have a version ready in "a few years".

Translation services have proved notoriously difficult to develop in the past for a number of reasons. First the software must be able to understand what the speaker is saying in his or her own language before it is translated. Getting a machine to recognise words is a problem that many people using relatively old-fashioned technologies like 'voice-dial' still face.

Google says it has been working on eliminating the problem and is developing voice-recognition technology that can learn and adapt to the accent and pitch of the speaker.

Another problem, familiar to anyone who has used a translation service, is capturing the actual meaning of what it being said. The sheer number of words in any language and the alternative meanings and nuances that can be attached to them make it notoriously difficult for automatic translation devices to render an accurate representation of what is being said.

However, Google has dedicated much time and effort to its translation project and now claims to have a database covering 52 of the world's estimated 6,000 languages. The latest language to be added is Haitian Creole.

"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time," said Franz Och, Google's head of translation services. "Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently."

Perhaps a note of caution should be sounded. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the discovery of the babel fish sparked a war because everyone was suddenly able to understand what was being said. ·