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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Translator Discs | ||
| Wearable devices that wirelessly connected to a speech translation computer. |
Niven provides a realistic version of a universal translator in Ringworld.
| "Stay on your vehicles," Speaker ordered in a low voice. "Wait until they reach us. Then dismount. I assume we are all wearing our communicator discs?"
Louis wore his inside his left wrist. The discs were linked to the autopilot aboard the Liar. They should work over such a distance, and the Liar's autopilot should be able to translate any new language... The tattooed one made a short speech. That was luck. The autopilot would need data before it could begin a translation... Presently the discs were filling in words and phrases... His voice was almost a chant, almost a recital of poetry. The autopilot was translating Louis's words into a similar chant, though it spoke to Louis in a conversational tone. Louis could hear the other translator discs whistling softly in Puppeteer, snarling quietly in the Hero's Tongue. |
| Technovelgy from Ringworld,
by Larry Niven. Published by Ballantine in 1970 Additional resources -
|
Rather than just presenting a magical device, Niven makes sure you know that interpreting speech is a processor intensive task, and might be best done centrally. Also, he notes that the machine needs a good-sized sample before translation is possible.
Compare to translatophone (1901) by Frank Stockton, the Language Rectifier from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams, the menslator from Troubled Star (1952) by George O. Smith and the translation program from Deep Eddy (1993) by Bruce Sterling.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
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'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
