iTRANS (Interactive Translation) Service
by
Kamesh Rao
The Problem
In some countries it can be difficult for a foreign traveler to communicate and be understood. The most common issue encountered is the inability in communicating with the locals like taxi drivers and shopkeepers and therefore most business visitors and tourists have a major issue in communicating. If a visitor needs to go to a particular place like a hotel, then the visitor will typically need to carry a name card identifying the place he is visiting to enable the taxi driver to understand. Also when haggling with vendors, many a time one notices that a calculator comes in handy to convey the numbers during a bargaining session.
Implementation Considerations
The iTRANS system stands for interactive translation and allows for a dedicated application on a cellular phone which will be used by travelers to translate simple sentences using embedded keywords. The phones having this feature will provide the necessary user interface to key in or record the text, which needs to be translated. The iTRANS system could use either of the following methods.
Method 1 Using Voice Recording
User records the sentence to be translated using a custom voice editor. To help simplify the translation process, the user is given a list of keywords to use. This compressed speech is transmitted to an iTRANS server on the network side. This server processes the speech, deciphers and converts to text. The iTRANS algorithm on this server will then do an analysis of the speech for the keywords and arrive at the optimal translation. This translation is sent back to the phone in compressed speech form and can be played back using the alert transducer (in phones which support a speaker phone, the audio is patched to the appropriate audio amplifier which plays back the speech audibly through the speaker). Alternatively the translation can be sent back as Unicode text, which can be displayed on the phone.
Method 2 Using Text Messaging
Here the user will type in the input string using a text editor and the text is then sent out to the network using either SMS or USSD. The iTRANS server on the network receives this text, translates this text to the local language and sends the Unicode version of the string bitmaps back to the phone for display.
Detailed Description
Method 1 Voice Recording Method
Mobile User Infrastructure Side
This scheme is a basic translator service with a difference since the analysis of speech on the phones is difficult to achieve given the limited computer resources, it is more practical to have a translator service application housed on the server. The phone will provide a translation feature whereby the person will activate the feature and speak up the sentence he wants to translate like a voice note. Stored compressed data of a voice recording is transmitted via a data call session to the service provider. This means the browser is invoked and the server will request the client 'on connection' to download ...
