Tag: Language

Traveling to a foreign country is amazing, but if you don’t know the language, it can be problematic. That’s why this Icon Speak T-Shirt is so brilliant. It’s hard to learn another language and aside from that, many are too lazy to try.

Japan sees a large number of international travelers and as you can imagine, communication can be a barrier. Somehow everything still keeps moving and the system isn’t bogged down by those communication problems. It is hard for foreigners to understand the announcements at airports, but things may get easier soon. 

If you are headed into Dothraki country you better know the language if you don’t want to lose your head. But don’t worry. There’s an app for that. The guy who created the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones has created a system to teach fans the language.

The recently released beta of the famous touchscreen text software Swype includes a new feature called Living Language. This optional setting automatically adds trending words to the user’s dictionary, giving your parents a chance to smh at your YOLO shenanigans.

Anyone who’s used Google Translate on a mobile device on the go has realized how close we are to getting a universal translator. While Google Translate isn’t always accurate, it does the job well enough for you to be able to get the gist of another language that you don’t speak.

I admit that robots creep me out. It goes back to watching Saturn 3 as a kid. Even cute Johnny 5 couldn’t cure me of the creepies. This odd robot form Japan called Talk-Torque 2 [JP] falls somewhere in between Johnny 5 and Hector on the creepy scale for me.

Anime fans are no doubt familiar with fansubs – short for ‘fan-subtitled’ – unauthorized translations of anime. The Japanese language isn’t the easiest language to master (is there a rank of that somewhere?), and so the quality of fansubs vary depending on the, well, fans.

Made by Steven Zhou and Syed Olmer Gilani of the National University of Singapore’s Interactive Multimedia Lab, What You Write Is What You Get (WYWIWYG) is a visual way of learning about language. Just like 5th Cell’s critically-acclaimed DS game Scribblenauts, WYWIWYG can analyze written words and come up with a virtual representation of the corresponding object. Even the set-up is a bit DS-like.

NEC aims to overcome language barriers with the Tele Scouter, a system that will process spoken language and display a translation on a retinal display. To maintain the portability of the gadget, NEC split the Tele Scouter into three parts: an eyepiece, a small computer and a remote server. Aside from the display, the microphone used to pick up speech is also mounted on the eyepiece.

Are you an unemployed web developer? Why not show off your resume credentials with these funny web technology bumper stickers. John Freeborn’s CODE Stickers are perfect for building geek cred with the guy in your rear-view mirror.

We’ve already featured a talking translator before, but it looked intimidating and/or boring. Not the Trinvo. It’s a hip and handy talking translator equipped with the very original “navigational wheel.” Wherever you go, people will surely want to talk to you if only to ask what that gadget is that you’re holding.

If you travel a lot, you might want to check out the newly announced Franklin TGA-490 language translator that can actually speak in 12 different languages. The new portable translator not only translates over 450,000 words and 12,000 phrases, it contains recorded samples of speech to provide accurate pronunciation in all 12 languages.