Nintendo to make DS translator

Parathod

Parathod

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According to the newspaper Sankei Shimbu (of course, a Japanese newspaper) our friends over at Nintendo are developing a touch-screen dictionary/translator.

Reports say that the translator will be used for translating text from English, Japanese, and Chinese to English, Japanese, and Chinese. Not only will it hold a sizable dictionary for all three languages, it will also include various mini-games.

It seems Nintendo's President Iwata is attempting to target new audiences with the announcement of this and multimedia player for the DS we recently reported.
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source: http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=4030

It doesn't sound as intuitive as Talkman, but sounds interesting. If it comes to the US, they'll definitely have to add Spanish.
 
The entire english language is like 38KB or something, if they are only doing translation, they could probably get away with a few languages easy..

arent they pretty much like proprietary SD cards? they can probably use whatever size they want.
 
[quote name='Dr Mario Kart']what are the capacity of these DS cards? I really wonder if they can put enough on there for it to be useful.[/quote]

If you think Nintendo is being overambitious...

July 12, 2004 - Sony Computer Entertainment intends to turn the PSP into more than just a game machine, as revealed at a press conference held today in Tokyo. At the conference, the company announced Talkman, a translation program.


Talkman accepts verbal input via a headset microphone. Speak some words in one language and the software instantly translates them into the specified language of your choosing. The game lets you select from different situations and nine languages. A bird character called Max interacts with you as you play.
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And it was originally intended to be a launch title for the PSP :lol: . Not even outside of gaming, has a translator (including non-verbal) been perfected for translating any language to another. How can they possibly expect this thing to distinguish between 9 different languages, translate them, and then speak it back to you in the language desired. It's hard enough getting the thing in "Seaman" to understand you.
 
[quote name='CouRageouS']Certainly interesting, but dunno how useful it'll be to have.[/quote]

I think the dictionary would probably get more use. Plus, they are adding minigames, so perhaps they'll have games to help improve your vocabulary. As for the translator... young kids will translate obscene phrases to other languages and mispronounce them when they think they are being funny and clever.
 
IT JUST HIT ME!!!!!!!!

Maybe this has something to do with Nintendo going "worldwide" online with the DS.

Why would american's need to translate other languages for?
I've always wondered why they included asian text as a option in Picochat.

This is interesting to me.....
 
meh, only if they've figured out some way to get a better translation than the mangled alphabet soup of babblefish. Direct text translators with any level of reliability between roman and asian langualges are a ways off.
 
[quote name='captaincold']IT JUST HIT ME!!!!!!!!

Maybe this has something to do with Nintendo going "worldwide" online with the DS.

Why would american's need to translate other languages for?
I've always wondered why they included asian text as a option in Picochat.

This is interesting to me.....[/quote]

Because it's region-free?
 
Anyone remember the InfoGenius series for the original Game Boy? Entering text was tedious, but mine got me through Spanish class in its day. They were available in several languages.

ae_7.JPG
 
[quote name='sn0b0ards']The entire english language is like 38KB or something, if they are only doing translation, they could probably get away with a few languages easy..

arent they pretty much like proprietary SD cards? they can probably use whatever size they want.[/quote]

I think you have a distorted concept of how much information is held within 38 kilobytes. That is just 38,000 characters in ASCII, less in Unicode. Leaving off the definition data and just creating a list of unique words within contemporary English, if you figure an average of five characters per word, this only offers 7600 words. A very minimal dictionary. Work in all the definition data and thesaurus entries, etc. and you've got something a good deal larger before you've even gotten into the issue of translation. A decent database of contemporary English is going to run closer to a megabyte.

Which isn't a problem. Games like Mario DS already consume about 10 megabytes and the DS cartridge design allows for substantially more. The current spec offered by Nintendo goes up to 1 gigabit AKA 128 megabytes. Currently that would make for a very pricey game but Nintendo is expecting the cost to bring it within reason within the DS's lifetime. They can offer larger capacities but that is the maximum for which all the engineering has already been performed and can be readily ordered by third party publishers. It's entirely possible if certain types of data intensive applications become popular we'll much higher capacities.

The same happened with the N64. Resident Evil II on that system used a 512 megabit cartridge that would have been prohibitively expensive at the time the system launched. If it enjoyed the kind of lifespan the NES had we'd probably be seeing gigabit and larger N64 games by now.
 
Actually if Sony liscenses Microsoft's best voice recognition software the could create a powerful language tool.

Of course this will probably not happen, but if it does... wow.
 
[quote name='epobirs']
I think you have a distorted concept of how much information is held within 38 kilobytes. That is just 38,000 characters in ASCII, less in Unicode. Leaving off the definition data and just creating a list of unique words within contemporary English, if you figure an average of five characters per word, this only offers 7600 words. A very minimal dictionary. Work in all the definition data and thesaurus entries, etc. and you've got something a good deal larger before you've even gotten into the issue of translation. A decent database of contemporary English is going to run closer to a megabyte.

Which isn't a problem. Games like Mario DS already consume about 10 megabytes and the DS cartridge design allows for substantially more. The current spec offered by Nintendo goes up to 1 gigabit AKA 128 megabytes. Currently that would make for a very pricey game but Nintendo is expecting the cost to bring it within reason within the DS's lifetime. They can offer larger capacities but that is the maximum for which all the engineering has already been performed and can be readily ordered by third party publishers. It's entirely possible if certain types of data intensive applications become popular we'll much higher capacities.

[/quote]

First of all, I have a very extensive knowledge of how much information is held in different amounts of data, but apparently you don't because 128 MB is no where near 1GB. There are 1024 Megabytes in 1 Gigabyte.

I do this stuff for a living kid. The reason I said 38KB was because my team was going to implement a spell checker for a linux project, and someone mentioned the size - it can be as small as 38KB to still have an effective listing of the most common english words. Yes a full library with more like 300K words would be more like a Megabyte, but my point was to show you do not need much space for it. (although a megabyte still is not much)
 
[quote name='sn0b0ards'][quote name='epobirs']
I think you have a distorted concept of how much information is held within 38 kilobytes. That is just 38,000 characters in ASCII, less in Unicode. Leaving off the definition data and just creating a list of unique words within contemporary English, if you figure an average of five characters per word, this only offers 7600 words. A very minimal dictionary. Work in all the definition data and thesaurus entries, etc. and you've got something a good deal larger before you've even gotten into the issue of translation. A decent database of contemporary English is going to run closer to a megabyte.

Which isn't a problem. Games like Mario DS already consume about 10 megabytes and the DS cartridge design allows for substantially more. The current spec offered by Nintendo goes up to 1 gigabit AKA 128 megabytes. Currently that would make for a very pricey game but Nintendo is expecting the cost to bring it within reason within the DS's lifetime. They can offer larger capacities but that is the maximum for which all the engineering has already been performed and can be readily ordered by third party publishers. It's entirely possible if certain types of data intensive applications become popular we'll much higher capacities.

[/quote]

First of all, I have a very extensive knowledge of how much information is held in different amounts of data, but apparently you don't because 128 MB is no where near 1GB. There are 1024 Megabytes in 1 Gigabyte.

I do this stuff for a living kid. The reason I said 38KB was because my team was going to implement a spell checker for a linux project, and someone mentioned the size - it can be as small as 38KB to still have an effective listing of the most common english words. Yes a full library with more like 300K words would be more like a Megabyte, but my point was to show you do not need much space for it. (although a megabyte still is not much)[/quote]

Ha ha, it's always amusing that the more wrong a person is, the more vehemently they attack others. :)

1 gigabit is not equal to 1 gigabyte, but 1 gigabit certainly does equal 128 megabytes. So the 'kid' was right, and you were wrong... nyah nyah nyah :)
 
I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong, but it is only because I mis-read :oops: I do know the difference between a bit and a byte, and he was right, but most people dont refer to anything in gigabits :roll:
 
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