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The Net
1 March 2015 2.00 h

FACTS AND SITES. MARTÍ CRESPO. NEW

marti.crespo@partal.cat

What did you say?

Google and Twitter present new state-of-the-art translation Apps for mobiles in major languages

Au­to­matic on­line text trans­la­tion pro­grams, apps and ser­vices have been around for quite a while and have pro­vided valu­able tools to In­ter­net users in nav­i­gat­ing their way around the web. Ver­bal trans­la­tion or di­rect in­ter­pre­ta­tion how­ever, is an­other ques­tion al­to­gether and is some­thing which has only re­cently be­come avail­able. Both Google and Twit­ter pre­sented de­vel­op­ments in this field in Jan­u­ary, which can bring au­to­matic trans­la­tion into our every­day lives with a lit­tle help from the mo­bile phone.

Uni­ver­sal trans­la­tor

The 2015 ver­sion of Google Trans­late is a marked im­prove­ment on pre­vi­ous ver­sions and comes with a no­table ad­di­tion: it now takes ad­vanatge of the ex­ten­sive de­vel­op­ment of smart­phone tech­nol­ogy com­bin­ing mi­cro­phone and cam­era ser­vices to trans­late in real time. The new app re­leased si­mul­ta­ne­ously for both An­droid and Apple iOS, “trans­forms mo­bile de­vices into tools for more pow­er­ful trans­la­tion.”

To start with, the trans­lat­ing ser­vices of­fered by Google Live chats in use since 2013 for the mo­bile op­er­at­ing sys­tem has been up­dated to make it “more fluid, nat­ural and quicker” just by tap­ping the mi­cro­phone icon on the screen. It also hooks up to Skype as the Mi­crosoft ser­vice of­fers some­thing that Google does not: video. The sys­tem, like all the oth­ers, is by no means per­fect, but de­vel­op­ers are adamant that like auto-com­plete tex­ting, con­tin­ued use of the ser­vice means greater ac­cu­racy.

This is s not the only new trans­la­tion ser­vice to come out of Cal­i­for­nia. Thanks to the in­te­gra­tion of Word Lens, a text recog­ni­tion sys­tem re­cently ac­quired by Google about a year ago, the phone can now trans­late the posters, signs and smaller texts we find around us, by using the built-in cam­era. This tech­nol­ogy, a com­bi­na­tion of OCR (op­ti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion) scan­ner and aug­mented re­al­ity, cur­rently only trans­lates from Eng­lish into Ger­man, Span­ish, French, Ital­ian, Por­tuguese and Russ­ian and vice versa. The ser­vice is tar­geted at tourists and pro­fes­sion­als who are trav­el­ling but the ser­vice is open and free to use by any­one.

For the mil­lions of Twit­ter users around the world, there is also good news. Mi­crosoft's au­to­matic trans­la­tor which was taken of­fline last year, is back on the mas­sive so­cial net­work­ing ser­vice. De­tail­ing smaller text mes­sages is eas­ier for this micro trans­lat­ing ser­vices of Twit­ter feeds and so can help users in 40 lan­guages and this num­ber will in­crease quickly.

Putting the sys­tem into ac­tion couldn't be eas­ier: just click both the web­site and the mo­bile ver­sion (An­droid and iOS), on the small icon of the world sym­bol top right of each Tweet and ex­panded op­tions ap­pear below.


Guillem Ful­lana i Hada d'Efak (Río Muni, Equa­to­r­ial Guinea, March 23, 1929 – Palma, Mal­lorca, Feb­ru­ary 15, 1995), bet­ter known as Guillem d'Efak [www.​escriptors.​cat/​autors/​efakg/], was a poet, play­wright, nar­ra­tor, trans­la­tor, singer and cul­tural ac­tivist, who at the age of three moved to Man­a­cor with his par­ents where he lived out the drama of the civil war. He began to write po­etry at the age of 16 and in 1956 pub­lished his first book of poems, in­flu­enced by the so-called “gen­er­a­tion on 1927” , El poeta i la mar. Aside from his nar­ra­tions and trans­lat­ing, he wrote plays, es­pe­cially for chil­dren, such as the well-known El di­moni cu­carell [goo.​gl/​0g2hLX]. From 1964 until 1980, when he moved back to Mal­lorca, he lived in Sabadell and then in Barcelona. Dur­ing his time in Barcelona he opened the­atre-cafés such as la Cova del Drac and la Cu­cafera, havens for the Nova Cançó [ja­fudes.blogspot.com]. He also made record­ings of his own songs as well as cov­ers. Some­where be­tween jazz and tra­di­tional Mal­lor­can music, a num­ber of his songs were sang by other artists. Guillem d'Efak [goo.​gl/​C4b1G1] died in 1995 from can­cer and in 2011 was posthu­mously awarded the Medalla d'Or de les Illes Balears [goo.​gl/​uhuX5e]. To com­mem­o­rate the twen­ti­eth an­niver­sary of his death, the youth group Xítxe­ros amb Em­penta [xitxe­rosambe­m­penta.org], with the sup­port of l'Obra Cul­tural Balear [www.​ocb.​cat] and the Art Cool Actiu or­gan­i­sa­tion [face­book.com/art­cool.actiu], have or­gan­ised a cel­e­bra­tion called 20anys20dies [www.​20a​nys2​0die​s.​cat], filled with events and ac­tiv­i­ties that “re­vive the mem­ory of a pro­lific artist, often for­got­ten by his­tory andthe in­sti­tu­tions”.

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