Talk:Mobile translation

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Please contribute to this article if you believe I have made any omissions or if used inappropriate style for an encyclopedic entry. Please do not advertise any company or services or comment a company's financial status or legal relations with another company. I believe Wikipedia is not the place for this. I have been through weeks of research to find different companies working in the field and list as many as possible, intending to update the list if I discover more. Two such companies/products were removed because apparently they have been found to be spammers or violating some other policies, e.g. Speereo voice translator. Thank you! Dalai.lamia (talk) 11:25, 15 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]



I have been advised that I can remove obsolete remarks about the article (the previous article in fact) so I have done so. Removed are:

  • Wikify|date=December 2008
  • Essay-like|date=January 2009
  • Advert|date=January 2009

I believe to have written the new article observing these requirements. If anyone believes I have not, please comment and help improve. Thank you --Dalai.lamia (talk) 14:29, 8 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Considering the mentioned weaknesses of the existing article on Mobile Translation, I have attempted to write a new article on the matter. I have introduced new divisioning and new information; the only parts of the existing article that I used are the Advantages - reordered and slightly edited and the Challenges, which I renamed to Disadvantages. In the latter I maintain that two of the disadvantages given are no longer valid, and I have also rewritten the linguistic quality part. I have also omitted the part about the "market players" although I believe the companies that have had significant contribution to the development of the service need to be mentioned. I hope I can get useful reviews of my article that will help improve it with a view towards replacing the existing article. Article text follows:


MOBILE TRANSLATION

Mobile translation is a machine translation service for handheld devices, including mobile telephones, Pocket PCs, and PDAs. It relies on computer programming in the sphere of computational linguistics and the device's communication means (SMS or Internet connection) to work. Mobile translation provides handheld device users with the advantage of an instantaneous and unmediated translation from one human language to another, usually against a service fee that is, nevertheless, significantly smaller than the human translator charges.

Mobile translation is part of the new services being offered to mobile communication users, also including other utilities such as location positioning (GPS service), e-wallet (mobile banking), business card/bar-code/text scanning etc.


SPECIFICS OF MOBILE TRANSLATION

In order to support the machine translation service, a mobile device needs to be able to communicate with external computers (servers) that receive the user-input text/speech, translate it and send it back to the user. This is usually done via an Internet connection (WAP, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, Wi-Fi) but some earlier applications used SMS to communicate with the translation server.

Mobile translation is not to be confused for the user-editable (talking) dictionaries and phrase books that are already widespread and available for many handheld devices.


FEATURES OF MOBILE TRANSLATION

Mobile translation may include a number of useful features, auxiliary to text translation which forms the basis of the service. While the user can input text using the device keyboard, they can also use pre-existing text in the form of email or SMS messages received on the user's device (email/SMS translation). It is also possible to send a translated message, optionally containing the source text as well as the translation.

Some mobile translation applications also offer additional services that further facilitate the translated communication process, such as: speech generation, where the (translated) text may be transformed into human speech (by a computer that renders the voice of a native speaker of the target language); speech recognition, where the user may talk to the device which will record the speech and send it to the translation server to convert into text before translating it; image translation, where the user can take a picture (using the device camera) of some printed text (a road sign, a restaurant menu, a page of a book etc.), have the application send it to the translation server which will apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, extract the text, return it to the user for editing (if necessary) and then translate it into the chosen language.


LANGUAGES SUPPORTED

Recently, there has been a notable increase of the number of language pairs offered for automatic translation on mobile devices. While Japanese service providers traditionally offer cross-translation for Japanese, Chinese, English and Korean, others may offer translation from and into over 20 languages, or over 200 language pairs, including most Latin languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish etc.), Slavic languages (Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Polish, Czech), Greek, Chinese, Arabic (Arabian, Persian), Hindi and a number of rare languages, such as Urdu, Pushtu, Tagalog and so on.

Speech generation is, however, limited to a smaller portion of the above, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese etc.). Image translation depends on the OCR languages available; providers such as ABBYY advertise support of 58 recognition languages in their Mobile OCR Engine 3.0.


ADVANTAGES OF MOBILE TRANSLATION

Having portable real-time automated translation at one's disposal has a number of practical uses and advantages.

Traveling: Real time mobile translation can help people traveling to a foreign country to make oneself understood or to understand others.

Business networking: Conducting discussions with (potential) foreign customers using mobile translation saves time and finances, and is instantaneous. Real time mobile translation is a much lower cost alternative to multilingual call centers using human translators. Networking within multinational teams may also be greatly facilitated using the service.

Globalized Social Networking: Mobile translation allows chatting and text messaging with friends at an international level. New friends and associates could be made by overcoming the language barrier.

Learning a foreign language: Learning a foreign language can be made easier and less expensive using a mobile device equipped with real time machine translation. Statistics reveal that most college students own mobile phones and find that learning a foreign language via mobile phone proves to be cheaper than on a PC. Furthermore, the portability of mobile phones makes it convenient for the foreign language learners to study outside the classroom in any place and in their own time.


DISADVANTAGES OF MOBILE TRANSLATION

Advances of mobile technology and of the machine translation services have helped reduce or even eliminate some of the disadvantages of mobile translation such as the reduced screen size of the mobile device and the one-finger keyboarding. Many new handheld devices come equipped with a QWERTY keyboard and/or a touch-sensitive screen, as well as handwriting recognition which significantly increases typing speed. After 2006, most new mobile phones and devices began featuring large screens with greater resolutions of 640 x 480 px, 854 x 480px, or even 1024 x 480 px, which gives the user enough visible space to read/write large texts.

However, the most important challenge facing the mobile translation industry is the linguistic and communicative quality of the translations. Although some providers claim to have achieved an accuracy as high as 95%, boasting proprietary technology that is capable of “understanding” idioms and slang language, machine translation is still distinctly of lower quality than human translation and should be used with care if the matters translated require correctness.

A disadvantage that needs mentioning is the requirement for a stable Internet connection on the user's mobile device. Since the SMS method of communicating with the translation server has proved less efficient that sending packets of data – because of the message length limit (160 characters) and the higher cost of SMS as compared with Internet traffic charges – Internet connectivity on mobile devices is a must, while coverage in some non-urban areas is still unstable. Dalai.lamia (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Dalai Lamia, the main problem I have with this page is that it seems to be largely made up of the claims made for mobile translators by manufacturers of the devices, with insufficient attention to whether these claims are true. You point out that there are problems with quality and correctness of the translation in the "disadavantages" section, whereas for me this raises the question of whether what these devices do should be called translation at all. Eg "Should be used with care if the matters translated require correctness" - is there any situation where correctness is not required? Is not "correctness" the core claim of such a device? I understand there may be situations where a certain margin of error is tolerable, but when one of the listed advantages is international "business networking" I think you need to place the "use with care" qualifier earlier rather than later. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.211.199.226 (talk) 03:24, 25 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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