I’m going to TEDxBG in Bulgaria on January 9th. The speaker line-up looks great, but there’s only one issue: not all talks will be in English. Now there’s several ways to deal with that.
I could learn Bulgarian. According to Tim Ferriss it’s a piece of cake and won’t take much time. I already speak a bit of Slovak and I can read the Кирилица alphabet, so that gives me a head start. I could request English subtitles, which someone could write live during the talk. Or someone could dub the talks. But are there enough non-Bulgarians in the room to make that worth the effort?
Here I’d like to propose a different solution: who can build me an iPhone application that listens to Bulgarian speech, translates it and then shows the translated text on my screen? You would do me and the rest of the world a huge favor.
My suggested approach is to use a speech to text library that supports Bulgarian, send the resulting text to Google Translate and display the translation on the screen.
The best way to understand what exactly is being spoken in Bulgarian is to know the language. You can opt for translations, but will never be sure whether it is being translated correctly. i suggest that you learn Bulgarian and you can do that in a very short period, right from your home.