July 10th, 2006 by Justin Oberman
The most recent issue of MIT’s Technology Review (not yet available online) has a pretty interesting story on the development of a new multilingual mobile messenger software being developed by Geneva Software Technologies in Bangalore India that will translate English text messages into multiple languages which can then be sent to any cell phone or mobile device in the world… no matter what character set it’s programmed to use.
The reason why such technology is getting a lot of attention recently is because (and my friend Taran from Knowprose will like this one) India’s Ministry of Science and Technology announced last February that it will use Geneva’s system to deliver disaster alerts. A simple message like “Giant waves coming, rush 1,000 meters away” translated and delivered could have saved thousands of lives when the Tsunami devastated the region almost two years ago.
Geneva’s software avoids the hurdle of Unicode technology (the standard international system for representing characters on a digital screen) by, the article explains, transmitting language characters as pictures encoded in a simple binary format. So while most people in rural areas of developing countries cant afford Unicode-compliant handsets, most phones are capable of rendering these on-screen characters (Its good to see MMS being put to good use, right Russell :-)) Yes, this means the phones must be capable of receiving pictures.
Thus far, the software can display characters from 14 Indian languages as well as 57 different languages from around the world sans any type of common standards. And, the article goes on to explain, messages can be targeted to specific regions using cellular networks databases of phone subscribers’ preferred languages. Pretty awesome.
“This is an example of how information could make a big difference in a disaster warning” says former Indian science and technology secretary Valangiman Ramamurthy.
Geneva is also working with the Indian Meteorological Department to create standard templates that will minimize translation inaccuracies during actual disasters.
TRANSCLICK
On the State Side another multilingual mobile service is also emerging. Transclick, which won the best application layer technology award at from the Telecommunications Industry Association at Globalcomm 2006, provide’s translation solutions within a mobile environment via SMS as well. Under current release of the product consumers can set up their account, translate text from one language to another as well as send an instant message translated from
one language to another. Transclick’s large range of language pairs for real-time translation (16 languages to/from English) and 150+ customizable subject domain specific dictionaries, combined with its Java API, have made it easy for wireless carriers to integrate high quality, professional language technology into existing messaging applications, with range of flexible options to select for enhancing the quality and accuracy of translation for both consumer and
enterprise cross-language border multilingual messaging applications.
Transclick is mostly designed for the business man or woman to help with cross language barriers in the corporate world launching (although I have no idea how they are tackling the problem of different characters (I tried to reach out to them for comment but have yet to have heard from them). Nevertheless, its a pretty neat system and will be launching shortly on on several wireless carriers (Cingular, Sprint/Nextel, Verizon Wireless, Orange, MoviStar and Vivo in Latin
America, China Mobile and China Unicom), as well as several collaboration portals (Skype, SMS.ac, Open BC) and corporate portals.
Relevant articles from MOPockets past.
Carrier Independent Global SMS
Sending Out and SMS (SOS) To The World
Technorati Tags: india, mms, mobile, mobileactive, mobitv, mobileactive, multilingual , sms, transclick, tsunami
