Will Skype Translator be all it’s cracked up to be? How will human translation be affected?
In mid-2014 Microsoft announced its plans to release the anticipated Skype Translator and now in late 2014 a new video has been released to support the campaign. The video shows two school children one in America and one in Mexico conversing over skype with real time audio translation. Similarly to Apple and Google’s speech recognition software the Skype Translator is able to convert speech into text but with a twist, the speech is then translated into a different language in real time and fed back to the other party. So far the application is able to offer English to Spanish translation and vice versa in audio form and in around 40 languages in text form.
What impact will this have on learning languages?
Some may argue this is the end of learning languages. Would one want to go through the effort of studying a new language, watching countless videos, reading numerous books, understanding new dialects and having to emigrate and live in a new country just to learn a new language, when one can easily communicate in real time with someone who speaks a totally different language to them with just access to internet connection and a mobile or laptop device. This is a debatable topic one left to individual preference.
Although this new technology is ground-breaking it is highly unlikely to deter people from travelling and wanting to learn new languages the old fashioned way and surely that is not what Microsoft intended when they first brought the idea into development. In fact it would probably encourage people to travel and learn new languages as people have been for years.
Privacy issues
As reported in the Guardian one controversial factor which has stood out with the new Skype Translator is the fact that Skype will record conversations in order to continually improve the translation, voice recognition services and train the system to better learn each language. Ask yourself would you be happy for your private conversations being recorded by Skype or is this a breach of privacy not worth the use?
Overall the Skype Translator has its benefits when it comes to convenience when communicating with someone who speaks a different language to you. The application could even go as far as being a cost effective way of using translation services, however the fact that the translation is not 100% accurate like many other machine translation platforms it is highly unlikely to replace human translation anytime soon. Apart from some privacy and accuracy issues it is likely to capture a great following and be a great addition to machine translation.
