The Wave Reader

The memoQ team announced today that they were having problems testing its latest innovation, The Wave Reader. For some years now, they had been working on this highly secret project: a device which looks similar to a virtual reality headset is worn by the translator, but instead of showing virtual reality it looks into the translator’s eyes and reads their thoughts. The problem the memoQ team faces is that the Wave Read works far too well.
The Wave Reader works by shining a low frequency wave on the eyes of the translators and then reading the reaction in their eyes. Because people think in a language, the device can read these thoughts and add the text to memoQ. While this sounds like a major innovation, it turned out that this is the easy part. The more complicated work relates to taking the raw thoughts from the translator and filtering it so that it is usable as translation.

At an early stage, there was a realization that thoughts about sex would have to be filtered out. One of the texts used early on in testing the Wave Reader was the 367 page European report on the correct use of soap. This is not considered the European Union’s most riveting report, but tests found that for this report the translator was likely to think of sex every half page. This contrasted with DH Lawrence classic novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover where the translator would not think of sex at all.

Another area of difficulty was shopping lists. The insertion of the phrase “mustn’t forget teabags” has proven to be the most likely mistake while testing the Wave Reader. The geographical location or language pair of the translator did not matter this phrase was inserted in 15% of the test translations. This would usually follow a pattern as follows: Translator would start working and everything would go well. After 90 minutes or so work they got a phone call from their significant other. There would be a couple of times where the translator would spot the phrase and remove it but eventually “mustn’t forget teabags” would be inserted in the translation. At lunch-time the translator would visit the supermarket. In the afternoon there would a new phrase inserted. This would be a profanity followed by “I forgot the teabags”.