I am an assistant principal at a public high school. I have worked in education for 25 years. Prior to my current position I served as a math department supervisor. For six years before that I was a district technology coordinator. My first 17 years in education were spent as a mathematics and computer science teacher.
I have a BA in Mathematics from The King's College, a Graduate Certificate in Instructional Technology from Georgian Court University, and a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
You can reach me on Twitter: @the4thscreen
Geek.com is reporting that Google is working on a service that would instantly translate your speech into another language so the person on the other end of a phone call would here the conversation in their own language. This service will be targeted at cell phone users. According to Google the delivery date for this service is two years
Frank Och, head of Google translation services explained to Times Online:
We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.
If this service ever materializes will it make foreign language instruction obsolete?
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On Monday, December 7th, Google held a major demo event at the Computer History Museum and unveiled some new features as reported in the NY Times. One of the features was near instant voice translation. Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google, spoke a full paragraph into his phone in English and within seconds the phone blurted out the translation in Spanish. Google plans to support all the world's major languages by the end of 2010.
via Mind Dump Blog
This has interesting implications for world language instruction. Overtime as more people walk around with mobile smartphones it becomes increasingly clear that you could use Google translate to carry on conversations with nearly anyone regardless of the language they speak. Will students lose interest in learning a foreign language, since they no longer see the need for it? If Google plans on rolling this out within a year, what will Google Translate look like in 5 years? 10 years?
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