HARRIS: From the home to the office to everywhere in between, technology helps us stay connected. But with more than 6,000 languages spoken worldwide, speaking the right words can be difficult for many traveling overseas. Can technology help us bridge that gap? Welcome to the future.</s>KATIE: When I'm speaking to people overseas, it certainly slows down communication to go through a translator. I work for a relief and development organization. In a relief situation, elaborate communication is key, and a little bit might be lost in the translation. It would be great to have some kind of speech technology that would allow relief workers to speak directly with the people that they're serving so that you could understand their needs as quickly as possible.</s>MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Quick and easy communication in a foreign language is essential for relief workers like Katie. And for the rest of us, it sure would make traveling overseas more fulfilling and enjoyable. Wouldn't it be great if you could speak any language effortlessly? (voice-over): The director of the Inter-Accent at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Alex Waibel is in the business of breaking language barriers.</s>DR. ALEX WAIBEL, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY: Have you been feeling well?</s>O'BRIEN: In Waibel's lab, you'll find portable PDA translators for tourists, goggles that project translated subtitles, even a speaker that can send a beam of translated auto to a single listener.</s>WAIBEL: You can have a personalized translation where one is listening in Spanish, another one in German or a third one with another language.</s>O'BRIEN: Even more amazing, electrodes that, when attached to cheek and throat, can turn a person's native tongue into a language they've never spoken before.</s>WAIBEL: And these electrodes can capture the movement, recognize the words that could have been spoken that way and translate them into another language and sound them out aloud.
Using Technology To Translate Languages