Homework 3 - Live Translation

For this assignment, I drove to the nearby neighborhood of West Rogers Park, where there is a large community of Jews and Muslims, to find foreign text in the real world to test Google Translate's live-translation functionality on. It did not take long while walking down the street to find several storefronts with Arabic, Hebrew, and even Russian text on them. With the direction technology and software are going, it could only be a matter of time before smart glasses are as ubiquitous as smart phones, and with that, comes technical capabilities never imagined before. I want to discuss the pros and cons of these potential technological advances.

Pros:

• Accessibility - Being able to travel to a foreign locations without speaking the language would become significantly less daunting if you could simply translate everything around you. Language would no longer be a barrier between personal interactions, which could completely change the way we interact with people that are different from us.
• Improved cultural understanding - Freedom to explore and experience new places and cultures would result in people gaining a greater understanding of people of differing cultures and ways of life.

Cons:

• Invasive - Sometimes people want to use speech barriers to maintain a level of privacy. It is very common for people to use another language than the norm of their area so as not to be understood, but being able to instantaneously translate everything would take away that privacy. Additionally, sometimes these cultural barriers exist to cater to specific types of clientele.
• "Too" Immersive - One of the benefits of AR is also one of its problems. If you wear glasses to replace what exists in reality with something fake, you are not truly experiencing your environment and surroundings. This detachment from reality could be unhealthy and continue to exacerbate the problems we have today with smartphones distracting our attention from the outside world.