PockeTalk Plus
Many of today’s technologies, from smartphones to cameras, are effectively “solved.” To borrow from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Kansas City,” some tech manufacturers seem to have “gone about as fur as they c’n go.”
But conquering language barriers with technology is an ongoing—and long-running—slog. The first attempt at machine translation goes back almost 90 years, to the efforts of a Soviet scientist, Petr Troyanskii. Since then, scientists have spent entire lifetimes trying to perfect it. Recent developments such as Google Translate, available for free on any computer or smartphone, and the subscription-based German technology DeepL, regarded by some as the best available, are impressive but still a long, long way from the dream of instant, in-ear translation.
