Role of Languages:
Every language has a rich history in which vast knowledge and wisdom can be found. The people who speak a language, communicate and share their thoughts, ideas and experiences in different forms in that medium both in writing and verbally. When we look atsome major historical language like Persian, Arabic, English, Urdu several names and their outstanding works come into mind e.g. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal, Mir, Manto, Molana Room, Saadi, Ibn Arbi, Ghazalijust to name a few.
Need of Interpretation:
As we all know there is no truly single global language in the world which is understood and spoken by all human beings. Every language is limited to an area or number of people who speak it. So the problem is how do we share and make it accessible to everyone all these great and exceptional works of literature, science and history? The only answer is through interpretation and translation.
Globalization& Its Challenges:
And it’s not just the historical work, we need interpretation on daily basis in our day to day lives as we live in a global world today thanks to the modern telecommunication invention such as the internet, telephone, mobile etc.
Though these modern inventions have reduced the distances but to make the world a truly global village we need to overcome all the barriers and language is one of them. Still we need better interpretation and translation ideas and services to make this happen.
Ideas:
Here I’m going to present some of the ideas which can help achieve this goal. Some of them might look a bit fancy but sooner or later, with the help of new technological advancements we might be able to achieve them.
Video > We are all familiar with the subtitles but what if we can replace them with voice and that too of the actual speakers/heroes in the picture to make them truly global!
Audio >What if the future calling services could be integrated with automatic interpretation software to remove the language barriers! How about you are talking to a French girl on your mobile but what you hear is plain Urdu, won’t this be great!!!
Written >You find an old book from somewhere written by Imam Ghazali and you are stuck thinking what to do with it. A text translator would come handy won’t it? Just point your mobile device to the page and it speaks out in your desired language, feeling like the author is narrating himself,,,, hurrah!
All these ideas require a lot of automation and use of AI (artificial intelligence) which seems like it’s all about technology but to get there we need lots of work on the part of actual human interpreters/translators to TEACH the technology. So it has to be a collective effort. Please share your ideas and/or leave comments below, thanks for reading!