Thanks to New Brunswick that is. New Brunswick’s Government announced earlier this month that they will help with the translation from English into French of all the Vancouver 2010 Games documents. They pledged $60,000 to a non-profit group, Sport New Brunswick, to provide with the translation.

One would think that Quebec would have been a more logical province to come forward with such an offer. Still, New Brunswick (Nouveau-Brunswick in French) is actually the only bilingual province in Canada per their constitution. Quebec, for its part, is the only Canadian province whose (sole) official language is French. Canada has two official languages, English and French of course, so it makes a lot of sense for the Games to be bilingual.

A story from PC World announces that Toshiba has developed a cell phone version of their PC translation system which translate between Chinese, English and Japanese.

The software uses a speech recognition method that uses one of two systems: statistical machine translation or rule-based machine translation. According to the article, tests provided fairly good results, although they state that the system is prone to misidentify some words, which in turn causes bad translations.

You can read the full article here.

As we wrote before, we’re not big fan of machine translations here; however, we do applaud the technical advances that have been made in the past years in this field. Google, for instance, is pouring a lot of energy in their Google Translate feature, and it seems that with technological advances coming from every corner of the world, accurate machine based translations could be something of a not so distant future.