Robots to Aid 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea

Winter Olympics who watches that you may ask? It may be a surprise to many but the Winter Olympics may be more popular than you would imagine them to be. The first winter Olympics were held in Chamonix, France in 1924 and have since grown to be a popular global event in the sporting world. In truth the Winter Olympics attracts viewer numbers in excess of 20 million across multiple platforms.

Winter Olympics traditionally includes sports that are practiced on snow and ice, sports such as ice hockey and snowboarding. Over the years the Winter Olympic Games have included events such as free skiing on a skip also known as Freestyle Mongul Skiing attracting more countries to participate and as a result increased interest in the sport from a wider audience.

The forthcoming winter Olympics due to be held in PyeongChang, South Korea between 9-25th Feb 2018 are expected to include 2500 competing athletes from 90 competing nations. Usually during these types of events a need for professional translation services or interpreting services are higly valuable to aid good communication for participants and the audience to help avoid embarrassing situations similar to what transpired during the 2015 Women’s FIFA World Cup where a twitter hashtag suggesting “Gonorrhoea for Sweden” was misinterpreted.

Now we know the Japanese are ahead when it comes to technology advancement and this latest reveal does not seem to be slowing them down. Hancom a Seoul based computer software company is set to reveal a new “artificial intelligence (AI) powered robot interpreter” for use at the 2018 Winter Oympic Games according to Korea Times. This human like robot is designed to emulate human-like facial expressions and is to be initially developed to translate 9 languages supporting Chinese translation services, Spanish translation services and French translation services to name a few with plans to expand in the future.

Will this development reduce the need for human translations? Now that is something to debate. Let us know your thoughts?

Image by: YOHNAP NEWS