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Converting a Foregien Language to English

A

aliasneo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 22, 2007
11
0
hey guys

i have got this movie from japan which is suppose to be nice but i dont know the language its speaking, i'm not sure that its japanese either. is there a tool for mac that i can some how convert what the language they are speaking into english.

thanks
 
aliasneo said:
hey guys

i have got this movie from japan which is suppose to be nice but i dont know the language its speaking, i'm not sure that its japanese either. is there a tool for mac that i can some how convert what the language they are speaking into english.

thanks
Click to expand...

I'm going to go out on a limb and say....no.


But someone might surprise me.
 
Yes it's called a translator. ;)

No, there's no such computer program. Maybe in the future?
 
If it has a separate subtitle track you could maybe rip the substitles to a text track, and run that through an electronic translator and reapply the track, but East Asian languages tend to not be translated very well by computers yet into Western European (and viceversa).

If it's just audio, maybe if you had a Japanese speech recognition programme, and again run the same process of making a text track and translating it. But your best bet would be to find a Japanese-speaking friend to watch it with it you.
 
guifa said:
If it's just audio, maybe if you had a Japanese speech recognition programme, and again run the same process of making a text track and translating it. But your best bet would be to find a Japanese-speaking friend to watch it with it you.
Click to expand...

Seeing how well text-to-text translators work in even just western-to-western languages, I think this might ultimately be futile.
 
OutThere said:
Seeing how well text-to-text translators work in even just western-to-western languages, I think this might ultimately be futile.
Click to expand...

True, it was more of a theoretical approach than a working solution :p

Although, I'm honestly not sure if most translation engines really have been updated much beyond adding new words, etc. A lot of them that people commonly use as far as I know have not had their primary algorithm changed in years. Google has decided to start recoding translation engines, and from what I'm told, the Arabic<->English one is actually rather usable. Take for example a random page from Al-Jazeera: http://google.com/translate?u=http:...8E7EA9DAD30F.htm&langpair=ar|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8 .

Although a lot of embedding is in an akward order for English, the meaning is far more clear and understandable than any other translator even for Spanish to English or French to English which are some of the most common translations.

Compare this to an El País article with the older engine they use for Spanish: http://translate.google.com/transla...7elpepinac_2/Tes&langpair=es|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8

And Spanish is a lot closer to English than Arabic, so it should be evident what can happen when you apply new techniques or completely redo the translation engine.

Random Mac Related Question: If you buy Mac OS X outside of the US, are there localised voices? That is, a British or German text-to-speech voice?
 
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