There's a lot of news in the spirit of Star Trek in my life this week. I recently received the Star Trek movie boxed set in the mail, which I had found on some closeout site for $30 and free shipping. How could I resist? I'll talk about my favorite, ST II: The Wrath of Khan some other time.
Anyway, this led to a number of conversations with people, about such topics as "It's the 21st Century, where's my flying car?!" and a great show on the History Channel called, "How William Shatner Changed the World".
So when I saw this piece on TechCrunch, I was sort of amazed by the possibilities. Apparently, Google Talk is adding a new translation bot for chat, which will provide translation from English to Chinese. The bot can be used as a direct look up tool, or in an actual group chat on-the-fly.
Can you imagine what a powerful tool this can be in the worlds of commerce and communications? It's a direct, real-time way of communicating with ANYONE, once the service can crunch the language. I'm no linguist, but I'd estimate that Chinese is much more difficult to translate than any of the Latin-based languages.
Bring on the Vulcans.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/19/google-talk-gets-one-step-closer-to-the-ultimate-babel-fish/
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