David Crookes finds out how fluent the new service is – and whether it has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate

“I can speak Spanish.” When those words left the lips of a former colleague, my head turned and my right eyebrow automatically raised. I knew the man well. True, he had visited Spain a few times but surely not enough for him to be able to claim that he could speak the language. Anyone can say “Cerveza, por favor”, but that wasn’t going to equip him with what I knew was about to come next.

He hadn’t heard the preceding conversation. The one in which a reporter had been discussing a complex case that would involve a call to the Spanish police. Then again, maybe he had hidden his fluency in another language and he certainly looked confident enough.

“I have some questions,” said the reporter. “Please can you phone this number and speak to the cops in Madrid and let me know what they say.” It’s not often that you see someone’s blood visibly drain from their face but I saw it that day.

As suspected, he was no more fluent in Spanish than Andrew Sachs. He made some excuse about being rusty, bravely said he would give it a go but asked if he could make the call in another room. Lo and behold, the interview never did quite work out. Something about the police not picking up the phone.

But if a service set to be launched later this year had been available, he would have been spared the embarrassment. For Skype Translator promises to automatically translate multilingual voice calls and it has the potential to revolutionise the way we talk to people whose language we do not share.

While translation programs already exist, the vast majority of them rely on the two people conversing to be in the same room at the same time. A person will talk in one language, indicate via a button or pause that they have finished talking and then get a translation that the other person can understand.

What Skype Translator will do is allow people to have fluid, remote conversations over the phone, with each side hearing the words spoken in the language they understand. As one of a number of companies working on the technology – the predominant mobile phone network in Japan NTT DoCoMo already has such a system running and Google is hoping to perfect real-time calls over the next few years – Skype is set to make a massive impact given it has more than a third of the international call market and 300 million users across the world. More.

See: The Independent

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