Christopher Middleton tests two devices that speak foreign languages on the streets of Chinatown.
Just as every group of partygoers has its designated driver, so every group of travellers has its own lumbered linguist: the person who is nominated by the rest of the party as “good at languages”, and who is pushed forward at every point to deal with waiters or taxi drivers in their local tongue. In the past, the LL has entered the fray armed with nothing but a phrase book and a hopeful smile. Now, though, he or she has a friend, in the shape of hand-held technology.
Yes, it’s now quite possible, when in a foreign country, to let your phone do the talking for you. Simply download the required language on to your mobile (via the Lonely Planet organisation), and when you find the phrase you’re after in, say, Czech, you just press the right button, and out through the loudspeaker will come the words “Kde je nejblizsi zubai?” (Where’s the nearest dentist?”).
Alternatively, you can buy a little device called a Trinvo Talking Translator, and in an instant have 12 languages at your fingertips. What’s more, instead of pronouncing them with an incomprehensible foreign accent, you sound like a real native. Or, at least, your phone does.
Take Polish, for example. For some time now, I have been trying to exchange a few words with the girls from Gdansk who come to clean our house. I have even bought a phrase book to assist the process. Unfortunately, not only do none of the letters in Polish sound the way they are written, but when you look up the phonetic pronunciation of a simple phrase such as “Please repeat that”, the book gives you the frankly impossible “proh-sheh pohf-tu-zhyhch”.
Of course, the ultimate Mission Unpronounceable is a trip to China, where the slightest tonal slip-up with a word like, say, “mah”, can end up with you calling someone’s mother a horse. So what stiffer test of these new techno-translation devices than to try them out on a visit to Chinatown in London?
The consensus over lunchtime dim sum at the Jade Garden restaurant, in Wardour Street, is that the pronunciation on both systems is spot on. When I hold the machine to the manager’s ear and press the button for “Where’s the lavatory?”, he points immediately to the Gents under the stairs. My fellow diners, too, have no complaints as regards clarity; passing the machines from table to table, both Cantonese and Mandarin speakers say they can understand every word.
So far so good. Out in the street, though, it’s much harder work, given that you have to stop total strangers in their tracks and then hold a phone to their ear. You also can’t tell which part of China they’re from, so you have to set one machine to Mandarin (the only Chinese language the Trinvo speaks) and the other to Cantonese (you can get Lonely Planet downloads in both).
You also have to be careful that you’re clicking on the right question; get it wrong, and instead of asking “Do you have a high chair?”, you can find yourself inquiring “Do you mind if I breastfeed here?”
For the most part, though, when you activate the simplest phrases, such as “What’s the time?” or “Which way is the station?”, people look straight away to their watches, or point immediately in the direction of Leicester Square Underground. The trouble starts, of course, when your question requires an answer. Quite naturally, when they have been asked something in their own language, people respond in that same language, and at normal speaking speed. So when you ask the waiter if you can pay the bill by credit card, he responds in equally fluent Cantonese that yes, you can, but the machine is downstairs. And seems surprised when you give him a blank look.
Should he wish to reply to the question “What’s nice on the menu today?”, he can either resort to pantomime grunts or fin-flapping, or, if he wants to find the right word, take hold of your machine, scroll down until the cursor highlights “pork” or “fish” (the words are written in Chinese as well as English), and then press the button.
That’s if the answer happens to be in the same section, such as Eating Out. However, this being a computer, not a book, all the words are stuck inside the machine, so if you want to find not the name of a food, but the phrase for “Can you write the price down, please?”, you can’t just flick back a couple of pages, but have to return to the main menu and try to remember whether that phrase comes under General Conversation or Essential Phrases. Or maybe Shopping.
Of the two systems, the Trinvo is the harder one to operate in this respect, since the display screen is a smaller, two-line affair, a bit like a calculator, and phrases have to be whizzed through at speed, via frantic rotation of the cursor wheel. Mind you, it has a broader range of phrases in the first place.
What both machines have in common, though, is that they do not translate automatically into another language when you speak into them. Not that this stops people from trying; it somehow seems to have become lodged in our minds that there really does exist a device like the one with which Mr Spock used to speak to the Klingons in Star Trek.
As yet, though, that model is issued only to crew members of the Starship Enterprise, so the Trinvo and its Lonely Planet-powered pal represent the cutting edge when it comes to getting through the language barrier.
One word of warning, though, from a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, concerning the advisability of parading these expensive-looking gadgets round the streets of Rio.
“I think you should also carry a piece of paper in your pocket,” he suggests. “It should say, in Portuguese: ‘Help, my translation machine has been stolen!’”
Photo: The Telegraph
