A Way out of Babylon?
I normally don’t do „corporate marketing” in this blog, but today I got a news release announcing a new way of communication to cross language barriers, which sounds very fascinating:
Together with IBM, the phone company Jajah has just started today a real-time free phone translation service called Jajah Babel that allows anyone in China, the U.S., UK and Australia to call a local number, speak in English and immediately hear the message back in Chinese Mandarin. It also works the other way round. So you can simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker, so they hear the message.
I wonder how the system manages to understand the ambiguities of language, which automatic translation programs don’t hit (for example: “Bill Gates” as the bill for the doors…), but nevertheless it is a great step ahead in finding a way out of Babylon.
