Nearly twenty years ago, when I first moved to the big city of Toronto, Canada, I only knew 3 languages. Court and embassy translators were then in high demand, and I thought I might be able to get some gigs. But despite my interest, I never learned any extra languages until after I moved away from Toronto. It's my guess, however, that like in any other big, busy international city, Toronto translators never thought their job well would run dry. If IBM's "MASTOR" (Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator) prototype technology, which currently runs on Win XP and CE, so on a PDA, ever gets released commercially, translators may have to find new work.

MASTOR is currently capable of taking an English-language audio as input via a microphone, and converting it to spoken Mandarin, Arabic subtitles for a TV broadcast and more. As an armchair linguist myself, I'm doubtful that anyone's current speech conversion technology is perfect or even any where near so. But MASTOR might be more evidence of a coming revolution or discovery regarding a universal translator.

While human translators probably don't have any immediate worries, I might recommend that they either get involved in such speech conversion development, or plan for a career change in their lifetime.

Links/ Sources: PCMag - IBM Strives For Superhuman Speech Tech.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://webguru.mathgurusonline.com/tech-watch/

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