Acoustic Barriers

A recent interpreting assignment made me think again of automated interpreting applications which I wrote about in one of my former posts. I was in a restaurant with one of my clients and their guests. The way in which we were seated wasn’t so favourable (around a big round-table), as I, the interpreter wasn’t sitting between the parties, but next to them. The result was that it became more and more difficult to understand what my client and their guest were saying after the background noise of the restaurant and the music was getting louder all the time. (Here is a video that explains what this means, the part about the background noise in bars starts at 5:00). I was about to switch to lip-reading to understand the most important parts of the conversation. The whole situation was a lot more tiresome compared to an average interpreting assignment, but the revelation that no automated interpreting application is likely to cope with this kind of noise pollution in the near future made me feel happy again. It looks like we, the flesh and blood interpreters can still lean back for a while. At least until the next assignment.

When are Fully Automated Interpreting Applications About to Come?

According to a recent article in the New York Times Google is soon going to update its Google Translate app for Android devices, which will be able to recognise speech and language in the case of the most popular languages offering a written translation for them. It’s obvious that it won’t take too long until the application will automatically “read” the translation. Skype has already accomplished that step in December 2014: In the case of Spanish and English it’s offering an interpretation service in real-time. Although the conversation is still limping along from time to time and grammatical aspects play just a secondary role – as can be seen in the video within the article – communication is moving on. As an interpreter, however, the real question is, when these applications are about to deliver an acceptable quality during negotiations or on conferences. The Interpreter’s Blog will keep an eye on this issue and is also going to get the opinion of experts and colleagues.