[FARS]

As a linguist and involved with machine (computer) translation at its beta workable inception (early 1970’s with computers the size of large desks but no longer needing temepature controlled environments) I have seen various gadgets including a hand held for the military which did audio to audio in several languages for battle field use.

Please note how brief the translation texts are in the video and in fact serve as “dictionary” text translations.

Not that impressive.

Translations require algorithms dealing with grammar in various languages - which are not the same in any of them. Even Google translate requires enormous human editing and cannot recognize names.

One case was the name in Persian which was a combination of the words “child” and “player” - came back as Mr. Pedophile!

Huge progress since 1970 but a long way from an accurate capability without fairly heavy human editing.

[sionnsar]

Thanks for the perspective! Engineer, not linguist, but I’ve seen the progression of merely speech recognition (then of letters) from ca 1980 (really poor, more focus was needed on recognizing the word “backspace”) until now. It’s got a long way to go.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for sharing your insights, dear FARS!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks swordmaker and FARS.