Tea, Earl Gray, hot, por favor.
In the 1960s, myriad futuristic devices were introduced to a wide-eyed audience of baby boomers on the hit, science fiction television show Star Trek. Star Trek’s mantra seemed to be—from transporters that scan and beam its occupants miles away in the blink of an eye, to replicators that provide a hot, made to order meal in seconds, just by asking for it,—if we can dream it, we can do it.
More than 40 years later many of those seemingly too-far-out-to-ever-be-developed devices are now in use. Take for instance Capt. Kirk’s universal translator. This device enabled Kirk to speak in real-time to his enemy in his own tongue, and thus bring about a truce, and once again restore peace to the galaxy.
Although we have no green snarling Gorn warriors to deal with, the Los Angeles Police Department does have a dilemma conversing in the hundreds of languages being spoken in the immigrant rich city. The solution: Voxtec’s Phraselator (www.voxtec.com). The Phraselator is a translation device that gives officers one-way communication with the public in multiple languages.
The brainstorm for the Phraselator came during Operation Desert Storm by Lee Morin, a doctor in the U.S. Navy, who uploaded Arabic language phrases to his laptop for playback to patients. The device was developed with the backing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and used in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers communicating with people in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, and other languages.
Currently, the Phraselator offers 40 different languages with 100,000 translated phrases with more on the way.
Although, unlike the universal translator, the Phraselator doesn’t scan brain-wave frequencies to create a basis for translation, but who knows what lies ahead? After all, the human mind, not space, is the final frontier.
adria.nieswand@advantagemedia.com
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