07.06.06 Popping out for a translation device

An alarming front-page headline in de Volkskrant of 7 June read: "Gasunie unable to continue to supply gas to electricity companies and industrial complexes from 2007". Large companies such as DSM and Akzo Nobel find themselves confronted with an impending gas shortage. Luckily, Gasunie was able to close a deal with mighty gas giant Russian Gazprom last Tuesday.

At the World Gas Conference (5-9 June in Amsterdam RAI), everything revolved around Gazprom's chief executive, Alexei Miller. The whole world wants to do business with him; everyone hangs on his every word. But it all went wrong during Miller's speech at the conference Tuesday morning. Entirely contrary to the expectations, Miller delivered his speech not in English, but in Russian! At this point "hundreds of conference-goers ran outside for a translation device".

We at Overtaal are still racking our brains as to what this mysterious 'translation device' might be. What does it look like and where can you buy it? Can it translate from and into every language? Will we soon be left penniless? Should we send our translators home?

Were that it were so! If only there were such a device or a computer capable of translating a text from Russian to Dutch with only a few simple operations, or - and why not - from Finnish to Greek. But alas and alack: no such computer exists, nor can one be expected in the near future. Universities' and large companies' attempts to develop such a computer have all ended in nothing. Translation (written language) and interpretation (spoken language) are and remain work for humans, not machines.