日本移动运营商将推出实时翻译程序
日本最大的移动运营商NTT Docomo宣布将于11月1日正式推出一款实时移动语音翻译应用程序，可在用户通话时实现日语与英语、中文、韩语之间的翻译转换，之后还将添加法语、德语、意大利语等其他七门语言。
An app offering real-time translations is to allow people in Japan to speak to foreigners over the phone with both parties using their native tongue.
NTT Docomo - the country's biggest mobile network - will initially convert Japanese to English, Mandarin and Korean, with other languages to follow.
It is the latest in a series of telephone conversation translators to launch in recent months.
The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual（使用多种语言的） staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism.
However, the software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations.
NTT Docomo unveiled its Hanashite Hon'yaku app for Android devices at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (Ceatec) show in Japan earlier this month, and plans to launch it on 1 November.
It provides users with voice translations of the other speaker's conversation after a slight pause, as well as providing a text readout.
"French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai will be added for this application in late November, raising the number of non-Japanese languages to 10," the firm said in a statement.
"Fast and accurate translations are possible with any smartphone, regardless of device specifications, because Hanashite Hon'yaku utilizes Docomo's cloud [remote computer servers] for processing."
The caller must subscribe to one of Docomo's packages to be able to use it.
NTT Docomo will soon face competition from France's Alcatel-Lucent which is developing a rival product, WeTalk. It can handle Japanese and about a dozen other languages including English, French and Arabic.
Alcatel-Lucent uses a patented technology to capture the user's voice and enhance it before applying speech recognition software. The data is then run through translation software before being run through a speech synthesizer（语音同步器）.
The firm said all this could be done in less than a second. However, it has opted to wait before the speaker has stopped talking before starting the translation after experiments carried out with workers at insurance company Axa suggested users preferred the experience.
"We are still working on improving the system," Gilles Gerlinger, the product's co-founder, told the BBC.
"You can do conversations with one person, but we want to allow conferences with 10 people and four different languages, and the system would provide translations in every language needed.
"We also have a project called MyVoice which can have a synthetic voice that sounds like your real one."
Mr Gerlinger suggested that his firm would make money from the product by renting servers with the necessary software to big businesses, and charging smaller ones a fee for the amount of time they used the service.
Despite the ambitions of those involved in the nascent（初期的） sector, one analyst questioned their chances of success.
"These kind of real-time technologies have been 'two to three years away' for the past decade," said Benedict Evans, technology expert at Enders Analysis.
"Both speech recognition and machine translation are sort of there if you're not too fussy.
"But they are generally not as good as speaking the language itself, and my suspicion is that they would not reliable enough to use them for business purposes when you need to be really sure about what the other person said."