Isn't it a pity there are two women in the kitchen?

How much for the Green Skeleton?

When you read this I’ll be in Mexico looking for the opportunity to use the title sentence which I speak with a flourish and a perfect accent:

Qué lástima que hay dos señoras en la Cocina?¹

The only time I successfully used the subtitle sentence was with a group of Japanese exchange students and they (truly) thought it was hilarious. Gaijin what?! The Internet says it looks like this and I’m sure my pronunciation and enunciation of this one is horrible:

グリーンスケルトンはいくらですか?

A friend helped me memorize it on the three hour Shinkansen bullet train ride back from Himejii castle. That’s where they filmed Ninjas kicking butt while Sean Connery looked on as James Bond in the movie You Only Live Twice. I bought a green skeleton from a souvenir vendor out front.

I have two more useless foreign language sentences in my repertoire. These after two years of college German. Austrian German was my mothers native language and she would regularly curse in it around the house. She would be proud:

Will you go to the movie with me? Willst du  mit mir ins Kino gehen?

and

My car doesn’t use a lot of gas. Mein Auto braucht wenig Benzin.

This story from writer

Sherman Alexie

using his college German inspired me to write this piece:

Everything Begins in Bakersfield

Growing up in Southern California where my mom fluently spoke Spanish (she was Tri-lingual, fluent in German/English/Spanish) as well as my wife, sister and daughter, I picked up some other Spanish words that are fun to say and you can eat like Meatballs (albóndigas) and Peanuts (cacahuates). I can also throw out crude words I don’t understand like f#*& a monkey. I may not make it back from Mexico.

My mom took the Kindertransport (children’s transport) out of Austria after Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich in the Anschluss. Trains and boats rescued over 10,000 kids and brought them over to England where they were taken in by local families until they could house them in refugee camps. Soon after my mom arrived she got the measles along with the daughter of her host family and the mother (who was a nurse) quarantined them both them in the same bed with an English / German dictionary.

After two weeks my mom was fluent in English.

Me - two years of German and all I can tell you is that my car is fuel efficient. Let my abject failure serve as evidence of the difficulty of learning a foreign language.

My Himeji green skeleton hanging out with me

Languages full of tenses, dialects, nuance and different character sets were originally too much for computers to handle. But with AI has come a leap in natural language understanding and correspondingly translation capabilities that are potentially life changing.

Remember the SINGULARITY where the computers become smarter than us at breakneck speed and then who knows what happens? There is an updated Tower of Babel story in here where rather than God blowing us off our tower scattered to the four winds speaking different languages, AI divides us. But until that (never) happens there is increasing magic to be had.

I mentioned in the article I updated just last week - Compress the Learning Curve - how Samsung now offers a feature they call Live Translate in their calling app. So for example if I want to call a shop in Oaxaca and ask if they sell their famous black pottery I can speak in English and have it spoken to the shop in Spanish. When they reply in Spanish, I hear the response in English.

I played around with a few live translation apps on my iPhone and I like Microsoft Translate² the best. It has a split screen view where you can use it for a live conversation where it translates between two people as you talk and each can read the translation in their native language sharing one phone.

Live translation will soon be incorporated into every form of communication on your phone. It’s already there for texting.

A last cool translation trick this time from Google and visual search. This is my Grandfather’s passport that got him out of Nazi Austria. I got the chills the first time I saw it. The second picture is Google automatically detecting the language and translating it in place on the original document.

best, Andrew

1. I have no idea where I came up with this sentence.

2. More here if you want to geek out on the Azure AI services and Neural dictionary it’s built on.