This seems like a small thing, but as someone who spent a decent stretch of time in Japan without anything beyond the most basic grasp of the language, I can attest that it would be very useful in practice. The feature is available via Word Lens in both the iOS and the Android versions of the Google Translate app. Thanks to this beautifully-built piece of software, I am excited for my next trip abroad.Google Translate could already translate Japanese text into English from a captured photo, but now the app skips a step, letting you point your camera at signs, menus and other things that might contain printed Japanese words, and get a translation to English on the fly (and vice versa). Even more miraculous? You don’t need a network connection or WiFi.Īs an insatiable traveler who can be intimidated by language barriers, I am so pleased to have such a pragmatic tool at my disposal. As the words are translated in a blink of an eye, virtual reality superimposes translated text directly on the foreign text using the camera phone. The other equally impressive feature of the word lens function in the app is the almost magical wording that appears before your eyes through the camera in place of the original text. Related: The Technology Behind Pokemon Go: Why Augmented Reality is the Future For example, Zero Shot Translation can translate between Korean and Japanese languages even though it’s never been taught to do so. Enabling this technology allows the system to translate between a language pair it’s never seen before! It does this by essentially creating its own representational language or ‘interlingua.’ This language is a way for the system to produce and make sense of newly interpreted information. The artificial intelligence summons the infinite library of patterns and translates on the spot.Īdditionally, a system called ‘Zero Shot Translation’, which is a translation between language pairs never seen explicitly by the system, has proven even more intelligent than the original artificial intelligence. This is how the text is immediately translated when the camera hovers over the foreign language. The artificial intelligence has a growing set of translated texts to scan for patterns, therefore increasing its knowledge base and capacity for translations of all languages with sufficient translation documentation. These computers scan the text for patterns, and once the computer identifies a pattern, it can use that same pattern to translate similar text in the future. Google programmed computers to analyze millions of documents that had been translated by human translators – from books, organizations and websites around the world. Stable|kernel website through word lens Artificial IntelligenceĪs a matter of fact, all of the translations come from computers that use a process called ‘statistical machine translation.’ This means computers generate translations based on patterns found in large amounts of text. But the major functionality game changers in creating the app are artificial intelligence and virtual reality. From what I can tell, GNMT has totally transformed Google Translate into a dependable, mobile translation tool. GNMT has reduced translation errors by more than 55-85% on several major language pairs. This machine learning algorithm analyzes full sentences and words in context rather than individual words or phrases on their own which is what Phrase Based Machine Translation (PBMT) does. I found that the translation error has been dramatically reduced because of the more recent introduction of the Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT). Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this Google Translate tool was the instantaneous, largely accurate English translation of text from a foreign language. ![]() I dug a bit deeper to understand how this technology operates and this is what I found. ![]() While researching the ‘word lens,’ I found that the Japanese to English translation was just made available, and the Spanish to English translation had been around for some time already. Then, my piqued curiosity lead me to further explore how the app works. We were all dumbfounded and began to come up with theories for how this could possibly work so quickly and so well.Īfter tossing around a couple of outlandish guesses, someone blurted out the word ‘algorithm.’ Yes, the ubiquitous buzz word I can’t seem to escape. I watched as the words appeared right before my eyes in freakishly accurate English. As a group of us sat down at a local eatery and began to browse the menu written in Spanish, a friend pulled out her phone and hovered over the words with the Google Translate live camera. I just returned from a trip down to Mexico for my best friend’s wedding where, despite many shocking sights and sounds, the most astonishing thing I experienced was the Google Translate word lens in action.
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