Google’s translation headphones are here, and they’re going to start a war
Douglas Adams’ in-ear translator from Hitchhiker’s Guide is becoming a reality. But knowing what people are really saying could be disastrous.
By Nigel Kendall
The aim of much new technology is to remove speech from the process of communication, so the excitement generated by Google’s in-ear headphones seems curiously anomalous. Coupled with the correct headset and software, these earphones, it is claimed, can simultaneously translate spoken language into the ear of the listener.
For those raised on a diet of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and that’s 99.999% of all people who write about technology), this represents nothing less than the first coming of the Babel fish, an aquatic creature that excretes simultaneous translations directly into its host’s ear canal.
Adams knew what he was doing. By making his Babel fish a naturally occurring phenomenon, he was implicitly acknowledging the impossibility of humans ever producing something “so mindbogglingly useful”, capable of tackling not just the raw vocabulary of a language, but also the cultural baggage that goes with it.
