The Professor rounds up a handful of interesting and informative gadget-related science stories from the week and presents them in an easily digestible liquid form.

We've already seen the idea of data-to-voice translation passed around, but NEC's latest software is far beyond the drawing board. Reportedly, the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile's display in just a second or two. The software was made compact enough to "operate on a small microchip mounted in a cellphone," and was designed especially to help users convert common travel phrases. Notably, it would be technically possible to make the English translation vocal, but according to NEC spokesman Mitsumasa Fukumoto, the firm isn't looking into that possibility at the moment. No word on when we'd see this technology hit the masses, nor if any other language combinations were in the works, but this would certainly make touring English-speaking locales a lot less strenuous for Japanese speakers.

[Via Physorg]

Some US researchers at Carnegie Mellon University -- who have clearly missed the basic gist of most traditional tellings of the Tower of Babel story -- are working on a nifty new technology for automatically translating bilingual conversations. Instead of speaking into a device and then waiting for the unit to transform the audio into text, translate that text and then output the translation in audio form (ala IBM's recently rolled-out solution), the "Tower of Babel" translator allows the conversationalists to mouth the words they wish to speak, which it then translates on the fly and creates an audio overdub of the conversation. The upshot of this is that two people can "speak" to each other face to face in their own respective languages, with minimal delay or confusion. Electrodes are hooked up to the neck and face to sense the mouth movements, but unfortunately the system is still in its infancy. Currently it can handle a small vocabulary of 100-200 words at about 80% accuracy, and accuracy drops off significantly beyond that vocab. The system currently works with translating Chinese to English and English to Spanish or German. Obviously there's a long way to go, but we're looking forward to the day when we can all get along and chat it up Tower of Babel style -- heck, we might as well build a spankin' tall building while we're at it, yeah?

[Via Slashdot]

For those hopeless Americans (and Brits) who've found themselves perusing the spectacular isles of CEATEC without a clue of what's being said, Sharp is coming to the rescue. Unless you've had access to babelfish-enabled posters giving the decrypted skinny on all the new gear, you may get the feeling that your communication skills aren't exactly up to speed. Sharp's currently unnamed voice-to-voice translator allows for speech recognition and convenient audio translation so you can actually hear what you're supposed to say. The device sports a PDA-like enclosure, monochrome touchscreen, "music playback" functionality, "90 percent" accuracy (read: good enough to order food and a discounted Xbox 360), and a built-in robotic vocalist that belts out phrases in whatever language you command. The LCD also shows you sentences in both native and foreign tongue, but the prototype on display apparently only converts Japanese and English. While we aren't certain if this gizmo will hit shelves after its stint at CEATEC, it would sure make Ken Kutaragi's mind numbing keynotes a bit easier to understand in the future.