Challenges and Disadvantages
Advances of mobile technology and of the machine translation services have helped reduce or even eliminate some of the disadvantages of mobile translation such as the reduced screen size of the mobile device and the one-finger keyboarding. Many new hand-held devices come equipped with a QWERTY keyboard and/or a touch-sensitive screen, as well as handwriting recognition which significantly increases typing speed. After 2006, most new mobile phones and devices began featuring large screens with greater resolutions of 640 x 480 px, 854 x 480 px, or even 1024 x 480 px, which gives the user enough visible space to read/write large texts. In 2011, the so-called hybrid translation technology, was introduced by myLanguage through its mobile app Vocre, which relies in large part on crowd-sourced language data.
However, the most important challenge facing the mobile translation industry is the linguistic and communicative quality of the translations. Although some providers claim to have achieved an accuracy as high as 95%, boasting proprietary technology that is capable of “understanding” idioms and slang language, machine translation is still distinctly of lower quality than human translation and should be used with care if the matters translated require correctness.
A disadvantage that needs mentioning is the requirement for a stable Internet connection on the user's mobile device. Since the SMS method of communicating with the translation server has proved less efficient that sending packets of data – because of the message length limit (160 characters) and the higher cost of SMS as compared with Internet traffic charges – Internet connectivity on mobile devices is a must, while coverage in some non-urban areas is still unstable.
Read more about this topic: Mobile Translation
Famous quotes containing the words challenges and and/or challenges:
“The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)
“The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)