Translation?

Not too sure if this belongs here but here goes:

Is there any way to feed the wav from a foreign film into some type of software app to get what is being said in a different language?

EX: Input a wav file from an anime show (Japanese) and get an English translation for it?

Thanks for any input!

[Vejita-sama]

Short answer no, long answer there are some text based and audio based software translation programs but they DO NOT work (babblefish like output). You really need a human to do this.

But if it's a popular title check the net. There a still lots of fansub scripts floating around out there. In fact most of the anime you'd d/load has subs added already.

[SaSi]

You can use the Star Trek universal translator to do that. Will be available by Stardate 4.180 (year 2.144)

Actually, it is somewhat possible. With varying levels of success.

The Microsoft Speech SDK supports English and Japanese. The SDK is about converting text into speech and speech into text. I've seen the text-to-speech in operation (in demo) and I would give it a passing grade. For starters. The text to speech looses because it's not possible to simulate a humanly like voice.

The idea would be to record voice, convert to text, give it to a text translator (like Systran) and then text to speech, here it comes in another language.

Problem is, Systran, although very good compared to previous attempts is a joke generator mostly (read the translation and laugh).

Another problem is ambient noise. Current Speech to text work in silent environments. A movie soundtrack should be considered a very noisy environment

Anyhow, with clever programming, the speech->speech translation is possible. The computing power is here, now, programming skills and theory is lacking.