Wow, guess I didn't need to take Spanish in college. SpeakLike is an IM client that does on-the fly translation between multiple languages. The company demoed an IM conversation between an English and Spanish speakers and English and Chinese. SpeakLike uses an automated translator for most conversation that automatically passes through the translation when it has a good confidence rating or sends it to a human translator if confidence on the translation is low. Obviously, when the human translation is required, things aren't instantaneous. SpeakLike claims to work with slang, idioms and even IM shorthand. Four questions for them after seeing the Demo:
1. How big is the translation staff and is it 24x7?
A: Currently, the company is just entering a private beta and will have limited hours for translators. The trial is limited to you and five of your favorite friends.
2. Other languages and does English have to be one of them?
The company is support English, Spanish, Simpified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
3. Integrate with existing IM clients?
Not at this time. But they're hoping to build this into a Web services layer that could sit between various applications and the end user that needs on-the-fly translation services.
4. Could the algorithm be used for existing texts?
Not the application they're targeting. The company puts its translation capabilities somehwere between Google on the crappy end and military translators on the great end. They do not expect the State Department to be calling for translation services.
The Leader in Network Knowledge
additional questions..
5) How much does it cost? Using human translators will cost some money for the company, will they pass this along to the end user?
6) How many languages are, or will be available?
7) Does it translate Klingon? (hee)
Their demo was extremely impressive, it changes the face of communications for a lot of people who do business with other language speakers.