Prophecy Watch: Universal Translator
In Star Trek, the crew could instantly communicate with different aliens because the computer provided a simultaneous automatic translation. Microsoft and Google are both in a race to be the first company to provide a universal translation of any conversation.
Microsoft unveiled a new service for Skype on Tuesday that can understand spoken words and translate them into another language, and speak them back almost in real-time.
Skype Translator will be available for Windows 8 before the end of the year, after 15 years of research, but Microsoft intends to make the service available to other platforms. Skype currently has 300 million monthly users spread across TVs, computers, tablets, and smartphones.
As this article notes, the translator learns the language and gets better with use.
The Bible talks about a “Tower of Babel” where God divided the people by language.
“Therefore it is called Babylon, for there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth, and from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth.” (Genesis 11:9, CSB)
In the future, the world will soon be able to communicate globally without a language barrier. Instead of a lingua franca (like Greek in the time of Jesus, and English today), we will soon be able to use a tool to instantly communicate in any language. The Bible even reveals that in the future, a one-world leader will be able to communicate to everyone at the same time, presumably with a universal simultaneous translation.
“It was permitted to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could both speak and cause whoever would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” (Revelation 13:15, CSB)
This new tool will bring us closer to that reality.
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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