Credit: Financial Times
Ten years ago, Microsoft conducted a live demo in China of a computer translating spoken English into spoken Mandarin. It was an extraordinary moment, a jaw-dropping demonstration of how technology can overcome language barriers. Watching it at the time, you felt that it would only be a couple of years until Douglas Adams’s mythical Babel Fish (the universal translator featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) would become a reality. We’d pop something in our left ear and be able to understand languages from any number of faraway lands.
That dream is still a way off, but we’re edging forward, bit by bit. Skype has been translating conversations in near real time for a while now, and there are a few devices dedicated to translating spoken sentences on the fly. The marker pen-sized Scan Reader Pen 3 PRO is one of those. Choose your spoken and translated language from a list of 112 — from Arabic to Vietnamese — say a few words, and in a couple of seconds you’ll hear the translation spoken and see it displayed on the built-in screen.
Swipe it over printed text and you can hear it read back or translated
As its name would suggest, it’s also a scanner. Swipe it over lines of printed text in any one of 55 languages (including Japanese, vertical swiping allowed) and you can hear them read back, or have them translated into the language of your choice, or save them in text format for exporting to a computer or mobile device. You can swipe at surprising speed (it claims to be able to handle 3,000 characters per minute with 98 percent accuracy), and if you happen to need individual words defined, it’ll do that too in Chinese and English. Of course, it’s also a voice recorder and MP3 player — why wouldn’t it be? It does have one limitation; unless you connect it to WiFi it can only translate between English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean — but hotspot it to your smartphone and you can instantly access the full range of languages. It’s an extraordinarily capable little gadget. Little wonder it smashed its crowdfunding targets earlier this year. NewYes Scan Reader Pen 3 PRO, $179.
