Toshiba Developing Translation System for Phones

Toshiba's translator will be local rather than require an Internet connection.

PCWorld reports that Toshiba is working on a trilingual translation system for cell phones that uses voice recognition and synthesis for output. While currently there are applications that can translate languages OTA, Toshiba's version--while still software--does all the processing locally rather than from a remote, online server. This makes translation quicker and reduces possible roaming charges.

The software originally made its debut back at CEATEC in October, demonstrating its ability to translate in three methods: English-Chinese, Chinese-English-Japanese, and rule-based translation for the remaining languages. While it's clearly no universal translator frequently used by residents of the pre-alternate Star Trek universe, CrunchGear's hands-on said that it worked extremely well.

Apparently, Toshiba's cell phone translator is a mobile version of a PC application already on sale in Japan. The site reports that the software uses speech recognition to determine the language and what was said. The app then applies one of two rules-- statistical machine translation or rule-based machine translation--to break the sentence down to components. The software then translates the sentence and outputs the results by way of speech synthesis.

Like CrunchGear, PCWorld also said that the cell-based software worked rather well. However, like all speech-recognition systems, it was prone to misidentifying certain words. PCWorld said that many second attempts proved not only successful, but the software translated the sentence correctly. The application itself is nearing completion, and is expected to go commercial soon.