Universal Translator

Remember the Universal Translator in Star Trek (and a host of other sci-fi films and books)? I have often thought this year how nice it would be to have one in France. It doesn't seem like it should be such a technically insurmountable problem at first glance. After all, I only would require translation from French to English(two languages which are somewhat related to one another) as opposed to English and, say, the language spoken from some alien race from the planet Yorbitron which almost certainly does not contain the same alphabet or phonetic sounds. There is already voice recognition software which is reasonably good at transcribing somebody 's voice when they enunciate clearly (I've seen some doctors use this while dictating), and since all languages follow rules (e.g. in English: subject + object + verb = sentence), one could envision inputting all of these rules into one big computer algorithm to allow for an instant translation of whatever was being said with only a minimal delay.

Obviously, however, this has turned out to be harder than was originally anticipated. This field is termed "machine translation" and despite the fact it's been around for some 50 or 60 years, the currently available products are less than ideal, even for simple stuff. Another website I use frequently, Learn French at About.com, tested out the top online French-English translators with some simple phrases to see how they did. For example, the relatively simple phrase, "I love you very much, honey", was translated in each case as something like "Je t'aime beaucoup, miel", having translated the affectionate term "honey" as "miel" (the literal term for honey, aka what bees make). So it looks like at this point, human translators do a much better job than machines can, and sadly I don't have the resources to hire somebody to walk around with me all day long to translate stuff for me.

So I guess for now, I'm stuck learning this crazy language of French, in which the three letter -ent are often inexplicably silent and writing the number 97 ("quatre-vingt dix-sept"= "four twentys and ten plus seven") involves no small amount of mental arithmetic.