When we first heard about JAJAH’s extremely simple process for providing machine-based telephone interpretation, it sounded too good to be true. The process is comprised of three easy steps — simply dial a number from any phone, speak in English, and hand your phone to the person who speaks Mandarin. The way it is described, the service would seem to automate much of human interpreters’ work, and would be particularly helpful for situations in which telephone interpreters are used. As usual, if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.We tested the service, currently touted as a way to help travelers overcome language barriers in China, just in time for the Beijing Olympics. We conducted several tests and found that the service seemed to work quite well at some levels, in that it did correctly render some of our words into the target languages. However, the voice recognition component misunderstood some of our words, even when we conducted tests with speakers of native and near-native English. To test the service in Mandarin, we used voice-over samples recorded by professional talent, and the results were a bit difficult to understand in English — then again, we purposely used samples with brand names that we knew tend to be problematic for machine translation tools. Now that we’ve aired our complaints, let’s take a look at a few points on the bright side of this innovation:

• You get what you pay for — at least, in the early stages. The service is free, so it should come as no surprise that it does not work perfectly yet. In spite of the disjointed target language versions we received in English and the fact that telephony provider JAJAH went with another Babel theme, we do not believe that the localization world will automatically relegate it to the role of industry laughingstock, as happened with BabelFish.
• Free machine-based telephone interpretation is a first. At Common Sense Advisory, we’ve been writing more in the past few months about the trend we are noticing toward computer-assisted interpretation (CAI) and the future synergies between translation memory and what we refer to as interpretation memory (IM) — pre-translated and pre-recorded words and phrases that serve to partially automate the process of interpretation. This additional focus in our research is intentional — CAI has already been widely implemented for devices used by the military, but this is one of the first instances we’re aware of that offers such a service for free, on-demand, via telephone, and to the general public. This type of service pushes CAI to a new level.
• Savvy developers will want to take note. This offering from JAJAH may not appear at first to represent a major technological advancement, but it does prove to the world that machine interpretation (MI) is possible, even if the quality is not yet up to par. LSPs — especially telephone interpretation providers — and technology companies that aim to stay ahead of the curve are well-served to keep CAI and MI on their radar. We predict that more and more of these services will begin to spring up soon.

Even for the traveler who is willing to hit the re-dial button a few times and is able to accept an imperfect rendition, this service may be of limited use. While it’s certainly not as costly as some of the phone-based Chinese interpretation services that have recently been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and other media as services for travelers to the Olympics, it could prove to be cost-prohibitive for a person dialing the number repeatedly and trying to confirm the recording’s accuracy while sitting in a taxi in Beijing with the meter running — especially if proper nouns, such as the hotel name, are rendered incorrectly. That’s precisely what happened in our example — take a look at the video below and judge for yourself. In summary, we don’t see this service replacing the need for phone-based interpreters anytime soon, but the general impact — and possibilities — for the language services industry are definitely worth noting.