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 initially¹ convert Japanese to English, Mandarin² 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 specially³ trained multilingual（使用多种语言的） staff, helping⁴ 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, Portuguese⁵, 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 specifications⁶, because Hanashite Hon'yaku utilizes⁷ Docomo's cloud [remote computer servers] for processing."

 

The caller must subscribe⁸ 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 opted⁹ 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 synthetic¹⁰ 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 nascent¹¹（初期的） sector¹², one analyst¹³ 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 fussy¹⁴.

 

"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."

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