This morning NEC invited us to participate in their latest press conference, where we had the chance to discover their latest automatic translator software, developed to be run on a mobile phone.
Simply put, thanks to this achievement, you will be able to translate any sentences you may speak into your phone from Japanese to English. The software has a pretty wide dictionary of 50,000 words, and while it is in fact not very new (NEC had the very same system developed in 1983), this is the very first time that we could see such software running on a everyday mobile phone (here a DocCoMo SIMPURE N1 or N601i).

Now back to reality, well even if the system was working perfectly well, it has a tremendous difficulty translating some basic English words used in the everyday Japanese; like, for example, “New York”, or “Jet-lag”, which was translated back in English into “Ten Pride” (photo 018.jpg in the gallery). But the most funny part was that this software, is ONLY able to translate from Japanese to English and not from English to Japanese, which is quite annoying if you happen to be lost in an English speaking country, letting your phone translate for you any sentences and cannot be able to understand the answer to your questions, since the software won’t translate back what has just been said to you.
Of course what we saw today was not a final product, but rather a product under development, and a very interesting one, so we hope that in the future we will see phones able to translate (both ways) any kind of conversation in different languages.