No language barrier ever again.

I made a Japanese friend the other day. He doesn't know a word of English, and I don't know a word of Japanese, yet we had a long and interesting conversation, thanks to his translation machine. He typed in what he wanted to say, and the machine perfectly translated it and said it to me. When I needed to say something to him, I would just speak into this machine, and the machine translated my English into Japanese text for him.  It is amazing to see this new generation of translators making it's way to the masses. We truly live in a small town on this planet.

One of my favorite comedians, Doug Stanhope, has a great bit about how we live in a small world where one can take a picture of their dick and send the image to a random email account and someone else on another part of the world will wake up in the morning with that image greeting him during breakfast. That’s a world too small for so many different languages. Heritage is one of the flaws in our current stage of being. If we can let go of so many different rules of different cultures and countries, we can come together as one human race and really progress intellectually.

Thankfully, this need to keep pointless traditions alive will not stop us from communicating with each other from all walks of life. I don’t think we realize just how small the world really is these days. We are all technologically awake and constantly connected. The need to keep languages alive and keep people talking a certain way will slowly but surely fade into the abyss. When you have a world where the poorest kid from the poorest neighborhood in the world has a real chance of finding a room with a computer with internet access where he has literally everything and anyone he could possibly need at his fingertips, well, it’s pretty obvious that that world is too small for 800 different languages with thousand other branching dialects. Like Doug Stanhope says, “put them all (languages) in a bingo ball hopper, and pick one and teach it to the world.”

Demand for quick translation in this world is becoming increasingly apparent. Next generation machine translators interpret text or speech the same way humans do; that is, a whole sentence from one language can now translate perfectly into another without the usual incident of grammar and punctuation getting mixed up in between. Research and development for this new form of translation has not come easy as it involves the combining of complex computing with varied linguistics of as many languages as possible. Although we are still a long way from replacing human translators, this new generation of machine translation has already surpassed human levels in many areas such as cost and speed. Today, all over the world, experts are hard at work teaching computers how to interpret ideas from one language to another resulting in quick translation and faster communication for travelers all over the world.

I can't wait to go to South India and talk in Tamil.