日本最大的移動運營商NTT Docomo宣布將于11月1日正式推出一款實時移動語音翻譯應用程序，可在用戶通話時實現日語與英語、中文、韓語之間的翻譯轉換，之后還將添加法語、德語、意大利語等其他七門語言。該公司在聲明中表示，任何智能手機都能通過該應用程序獲得快速準確的翻譯，因為該程序是在其云處理系統基礎上運行的。不過，用戶需訂購該公司的套餐才能使用此翻譯程序。與此同時，阿爾卡特-朗訊以及微軟等公司也都在研制類似的語音轉換應用程序，不但能實現一對一的語言轉換，還能實現十人以內、四種語言的會議實時翻譯。雖然發展前景廣闊，不過有專家也對這種語言轉換程序的可靠度表示擔憂，稱語音識別和機器翻譯終究無法取代語言技能，尤其在商務翻譯中，機器軟件或許并不是那么可靠。

Hong Kong has been named the world's freest economy for the 15th year in a row, according to an annual report released Tuesday by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

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 initially convert Japanese to English, Mandarin 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 specially trained multilingual staff, helping 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, Portuguese, 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 specifications, because Hanashite Hon'yaku utilizes Docomo's cloud [remote computer servers] for processing."

The caller must subscribe 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.

The firm said all this could be done in less than a second. However, it has opted 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 synthetic 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 nascent sector, one analyst 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 fussy.

"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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(Agencies)

（中國日報網英語點津 Helen ）