Interpreters and Conference Interpreting

Not quite. But an evolution for young interpreterstobe to think about : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8343941.stm
For the current employers of interpreters £ 1666 per set is not a big amount on their budget. New technology is expensive at first, but the more the technology curve rises and the more of that technology is sold, the more the price goes down.
A comparison: where was the pc when most of you were born and where is the pc-now?

The downfall of interpreting was already announced many years ago and judging from the current WRITTEN translation softwares available now in 2010, I can hardly imagine an interpretation software that could really provide reliable interpretation next year.
And let's not forget that the Mayans have predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012, which will seriously reduce appropriately named Mr Omino's profits on his gadget...
http://www.liveindia.com/mayacalendar/index.html

Aymeric wrote:The downfall of interpreting was already announced many years ago and judging from the current WRITTEN translation softwares available now in 2010, I can hardly imagine an interpretation software that could really provide reliable interpretation next year.
And let's not forget that the Mayans have predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012, which will seriously reduce appropriately named Mr Omino's profits on his gadget...
http://www.liveindia.com/mayacalendar/index.html

I picked the wrong title. No, such a "gadget" can not provide reliable interpretation next year, but most on this forum are aspiring to go to an interpreter school or at the beginning of their career. Technology evolves. How efficient will such a gadget be in say 20 years from now, when most here are in their forties/early fifties. Don't forget that in most Western countries, the pension age will be 67.
Will Trados-like reductions be introduced for the use of that technology and will the interpreter only be paid a %-age of his/her fee for whispering the words not produced by that technology. Should it become efficient, translation will also suffer. Imagine just having to read a text in one language and being able to read the output in those glasses. All you have to do is copy it.
For some languages, Google Translate becomes scaringly accurate. Texts are corrected and fed by humans and the output is stored. Some agencies already try to find "translators" to rephrase texts produced by G.T. In the long run (10-20 years), such a "gadget" will have an impact on the interpreting profession. Image how much international institutions could save if such tools became efficient.

The keyword you used several times is 'imagine'. I don't think the interpreting profession is different from any other trade in this respect: most human activities face the imagined 'threat' of robotisation, and this idea has been around in sci-fi and technology fairs for decades already. For some reason I just can't 'imagine' Obama using that to listen to Ahmadinejad setting forth his conditions for a nuclear weapons-free Iran...

Gradually, through the decades, technology has transformed many professions. My stepfather is an engineer, and he says that his work now is completely unrecognizable from when he graduated from university. I doubt engineers are the only ones who have experienced this. And yet, we still need engineers. Tecnnology evolves, and jobs do, too. The interpreting profession will change. But there will always be a need for interpreters. Cálmense.

Firstly... in order to interpret, computers are going to need to be able to think. And when computers can think, humankind is going to have a lot more to worry about than hordes of unemployed interpreters.

Secondly... read the last line of the article...

"When it goes on sale, a batch of 30 headsets will cost about 7.5m yen (£50,000). The cost does not include the price of the translation tools and software"

He's invented a headset, but he hasn't improved on existing software, which is what does the interpreting.
Currently Voice recognition software has to be taught to deal with one speaker only, over weeks and weeks. Let alone dozens of different speakers per day, or non-native speakers.
And then the (error-strewn) product of that voice recognition has to be fed into a translation software. Anyone who has tried them out knows that they work quite well between very similar languages (French into Spanish) but they still make lots of silly mistakes (where intelligent thought it required usually). But they are hopeless for more distant combinations (German into Italian, Polish into English).

We're all right for a few years yet

Andy

Also discussed on : http://www.proz.com/forum/interpreting/ ... eting.html

When on sale: did you ever hear of the product life cycle? When a product is first on the market and bought by early adopters, its price is high. More and more people buy the product and the price goes down.
NEC is a multinational engage in Artificial intelligence. Didn't Sony produce a human look-alike female robot, with which interaction is possible? The robot "speak" Japanese. If fed an additional English language module, what would stand in the way of interpreting.

http://www.durf.org/2009/11/19/et-tu-barack/

andy