Law Practice Management Tips & Tricks

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Citation: Vol. 80 No. 3 Pg. 15
• Pages: 15
• Publication year: 2011

Law Practice Management Tips & Tricks No. 80 J. Kan. Bar Assn 3, 15 (2011) Kansas Bar Journal March, 2011

Mobile, Machine Translation is Here

By Larry N. Zimmerman, Valentine, Zimmerman & Zimmerman P.A., Topeka, kslpm@larryzimmerman.com

“ Ich liebe Sprachen (German), j'adore les langues (French), jeg elsker sprog (Danish), and ma armastan keeles (Estonian)." In English, "I love languages."

I really do love languages and discovering the newest version of Google's Translate app for Android has kept me smiling for weeks now. Admittedly, neither my day travelling in Estonia with a Danish journalism student nor my seventh grade French is sufficient to check the accuracy of those three translations. A few years of German, however, is enough to make me think the German is spot-on.

Google Translate Foundations

Translate has been around for several years at translate. google.com and does what you would expect. Enter in text from one language and the site translates it to one of more than 50 other languages. More recent enhancements support audio input allowing users to speak a phrase and hear it spoken back in the selected language. Instant translation is also fairly recent allowing the site to automatically recognize the input language and translate almost as fast as you type.

Some might recall earlier experiments in online translation like Babelfish from the ancient days of AltaVista (Babelfish lives on under Yahoo at babelfish.yahoo.com). It was impressive at the time but pretty crude and often more useful for creating "found poetry" by translating and retranslating text until it took flight from the original. (One of my favorites was a line from an English movie review for Transformers run through the Japanese translator and back to yield, "... summer vacation is good, the duck you cannot know.")

By contrast, the technology behind Google Translate has been boringly accurate. I regularly plug headlines and news stories from foreign-language publications through it and the translations match the publications' own translations. Most major sites are pre-translated, but as the social media world expands and vital news from spots like Tunisia and Egypt leak out via Twitter feeds, instant translation adds new dimensions to fast-breaking news stories.

Fortunately, Translate is not all business. Users quickly discovered an "Easter Egg" whereby the voice output could be tweaked to beatbox. Work out your own soundtrack using the cheat...