You arrive at Toronto International Airport, but you can't speak English or French. The immigration officer leads you to a computer terminal, where everything he or she says is instantly translated into your native language.
Touting that this vision will be a reality is Uni-Verse, a company that launched its new Diplomat, a real-time chat translation software, at Comdex this week.
"We're the only act in town right now that offers online, multilingual, multidirectional chat translation," said Uni-Verse CEO Bruce Lichorowic.
Diplomat is an Internet relay chat client based on GlobalLink's translation software. A user installs the software on a desktop computer and logs into a standard text-based Internet relay chat server. But the typed conversation is routed through Uni-Verse's servers, which act as a proxy to translate between English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.
The San Clemente, California company also provides Web Client, an HTML version of the product, which can be embedded into any Web page.
Diplomat is priced at US$39.95 and costs $9.95 per month to run. Web Client software is free but the service also charges a $9.95 monthly fee.
The company is currently offering Uni-Verse Server, a server-side version of its products, to corporations for applications such as text support.
"With the Uni-Verse Server, users can type in their request or problem in their native language and the support person can reply in English," said Lichorowic. He believes that Uni-Verse may benefit corporations, especially considering that multilingual employees are often expensive to hire.
However, despite the widespread adoption of translation software by companies like AltaVista, machine translation is still an imperfect science, according to Jim Robinson, a translation-technology consultant with Language Partners International.
"Their usefulness really depends on what you're trying to translate," he said. "But machine translation software is a long way off perfect translations."
Uni-Verse provides about 90 percent accuracy, according to Lichorowic.
"It's not bad for machine translation software," said Lichorowic. "Especially considering it only takes 20 milliseconds to translate a sentence."
