Communicating with people that speak a different language might cause miscommunication and even create a problem, but there is technology that can help us today.
I love Star Trek. In the various episodes from each series we would find the members of the Enterprise, Voyager, at Deep Space Nine or elsewhere confronting beings from other planets. Communicating with these other people and creatures seldom seemed to be a problem.
For us avid supporters of Star Trek (some would call us “Trekkers”) we knew they had a “Universal Language Translator.” It could hear and then interpret the language so all parties understood.
Well, we are very close to that today with a tool called Translate from Google. We’ve had technologies like this for a while and this one just added a feature to make it even better.
The picture you see with this article is me showing a very helpful technician at my hotel in Acapulco how to talk with the Translate app on my iPhone. I was able to speak into my iPhone in English (my native language), then the app translated that into Spanish, and then — here’s the really cool part — it spoke my words back to him in Spanish (his native language).
Then when he wanted to answer, he spoke fluent Spanish into the phone, which then translated the words into English, and then the app spoke the words back to me in fluent English. Wow!
But there is also added feature!
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