Tokyo Friendfinder
Specialist translators could soon be heading for job centers across the world if Fuji Xerox makes good on the technology it has developed for its latest prototype photocopy machine.
The device, currently on show [Subscription link] only in Japan, can scan a printed sheet of Japanese text from a newspaper or magazine and churn out a translation of it in Chinese, English or Korean while retaining the original layout. Flip a switch and the linguistic parsing works in the opposite direction too.
Fuji Xerox’s secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts.
While the concept of a one-touch translation machine is a wonderful idea for anyone who regularly works in multiple languages (guilty…), let’s hope the technology moves on from the current generation of machine-translation (MT) software that can be seen mangling sentences on sites like Babel Fish and Google Translate.
(Crossposted to Tech.co.uk)
01:29 AM 
J Mark Lytle •
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Tagged with:
fuji xerox
japanese
language
photocopiers
translation
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What a great idea, as said hope it is better than what is around. But great if works, means more talkin’ all over the eastern world. Hope to hear more.
Posted by shayne on 07/09/26 at 05:32 PM -
All your base.....
nevermind, I’ll leave that to the /. trolls
Posted by zig on 07/09/27 at 08:38 PM -
Neat, but it’s not really the photocopier doing the translation. it’s the back end server. The copier is scanning the document (probably as a .tiff) and sending the file to the back server (i work for a copier company, and our machines do some really neat scanning with some cool ocr and workflow software. I’m sure their OCR engine is vastly better from the looks of the article). There the document is probably OCR’d and the appropriate translation is made, and sent back to the copier as a print job quickly to appear as a single copy job.
Posted by Monkey on 07/09/27 at 09:54 PM -
“All your base.....
nevermind, I’ll leave that to the /. trolls “
Yes, please lives these madders to the pro fishing nulls.
Posted by a winner is you on 07/09/28 at 01:27 AM -
The photo is of a printer, not a copier.
Posted by Fernando on 07/10/01 at 12:28 PM -
Fernando - I guess it’s just to illustrate, as the copier isn’t available yet!
Posted by Steve on 07/10/01 at 08:05 PM -
)
Posted by tasha on 07/10/11 at 08:06 PM -
It’s a neat idea, although translators shouldn’t worry about loosing their jobs anytime soon. Machine translation just can’t compete with humans, the problem being that machines are simply too logical and can’t recognise the context in which a word appears. Until engineers find a way for computers to distinguish the meaning of similar spellings/pronunciation based on a sentence’s other words, translators should have nothing to fear!
Posted by Marcus on 07/12/30 at 03:43 PM -
How accurate could something like this really be though?
Posted by Okinawa on 08/02/07 at 01:17 PM -
What a good idea. This will save a lot of time and money. Xerox absolutely rocks.
Posted by Technology News on 08/02/13 at 04:01 AM -
“The photo is of a printer, not a copier.” +1
Posted by JOsh on 08/02/29 at 12:54 PM -
I wonder if translation quality is like google translation or worse ....
Posted by Stairy on 08/02/29 at 12:59 PM -
Is it right that translation will be available not only Japanese to English?
Posted by The Park Maniac on 08/03/01 at 01:51 AM