There is a saying that goes…. “The world is getting smaller thanks to technology.” And after some wonderful conversations with elderly friends and family over the years about what has been the biggest change to the world that they have seen in their lifetime, the saying stands true.
The responses that I received where all pretty similar. The top three consisted of improvements in the fields of …..
1. Medicine
2. Transportation eg. Planes
3. Communication eg. Telephones
However, I always felt that the biggest barrier of the world becoming truely small was language.
The thought of living or travelling in a country that spoke or wrote in a language other than English is all very scary.
Everyday tasks like asking someone directions, buying food at the markets, knowing what type off ingredients were in a meal because you suffer from allergic reactions, and using the transport system to go from point A to point B all become extremely daunting and nerve racking.
Now considering that I am moving to China and my Chinese is so poor that I would struggle to survive there, how am I going to deal with this situation? Through the use of technology.
I have been playing with an app called “Google Translate”. It is an app that allows you to have conversations with another person of a different language and translates the conversation instantly into both languages being spoken. But what makes this app even more impressive is its camera feature. If you hold the camera over the writing of the other language eg. Chinese, that you are trying to read, the camera screen will translate the writing into your preferred language eg. English.
I highly recommend downloading this app if you are planning to go another country which is not your native language and you don’t speak that language.
The world is truely getting smaller thanks to technology.
The Man In The Pink Hat 