Company Building a Real-Life Babel Fish

If you’re like me you spent a significant portion of time in high school reading Douglas Adams and watching Star Trek instead of losing your virginity. Both of them have concepts of a universal translator, wherein you could walk into any foreign country (or planet) and effortlessly communicate with the inhabitants. This September a company will be doing just that with a device called The Pilot System. It’s a microphone hooked up to a headphone in your ear, which simultaneously translates a foreign language into English. Undoubtedly it will miss out on specific phrases (literally translating “the cat got his tongue” would probably confuse someone new to English) but it would still allow you to interact more than you can now. I predict that in the future we will also have regular-looking glasses that will overlay text with English, so that you could wander through Shanghai and read every sign. You guys! We live in the future!

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