Do we need multilingual flight attendants?
 

With Google Translate a system could be designed to the automated message system whereby the pursuer can type in what he or she wants the PA message to say and it will play over the PA and display on the PTV unit the message.

This would work well for people who don't understand English. For instance if you have a Russian passenger you would go to the system and ask for them in Russian to turn off their electronics.

When the Fasten Seatbelt sign comes on an automated message in another language can play.

Is this how they program the automated announcements on the Airbus planes?

Once in Kuala Lumper I boarded an AirAsia flight and every one was seated and we were ready to depart but for one family of indeterminate Asian origin who were still milling about in the aisle seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were holding up everyone departure. Asian FA's being less confrontational than in the west, rather than just go up to them and tell them to sit down, they attempted to deal with it with cabin announcements for everyone to please be seated in English and Bahasa Melayu, but that seemed to have no effect either. So then a FA started working that panel on the A320 and out came a staggering array of canned cabin announcements in more than a half dozen different Asian languages. I recognized several dialects of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and a couple of languages I don't even know what the heck they were, so apparently they have a pretty comprehensive multi language canned cabin announcement system in place. The family finally seemed to get the message and took their seats and we departed.

Although they were just prerecorded announcements, not any kind of on the fly machine translation. Google translate is about the awesomest thing ever but I wouldn't trust it for any serious safety related translation since it does still produce nonsensical random results from time to time.

Perhaps the first airline to implement this system could borrow US's "Come fly with US" slogan and adapt it to "Come fly with Stephen Hawking"

This is true –.it's very good, but it doesn't always cope well with more complicated grammatical constructions, particularly if there is no analogous construction in the language it is translating into. If in doubt, copy the translation back and do a "reverse" translation: sometimes the result is surprising. So one would need to be careful about "off-the-cuff" or emergency cabin announcements. No doubt the technology (if that's the right word) will get better.

Too many times I've had native speakers of foreign languages tell me that Google Translate has come up with nonsense. I don't think this will work in any kind of customer service or safety related situation.

i recall the ticket agent asking some person "did you pack your own bag?" this person had absolutely no idea what was being asked. the TA then stated in perfect english "if you cannot answer, i cannot let you on this flight!"

if i were asked that question in native language in at least 100 countries, i would not have the slightest idea what was going on.

Here is what I posted on another thread....


http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/europ...atient-23.html

I believe that it was translated from English to another language and back again. 'vertebrae to the park on the bus' means 'back to the park on the bus' for instance. Perfectly useless unless one knows English well enough and the subject matter at hand well enough to translate that mess into a usable text.

There is a reason why airlines have multi-lingual staff in place, and you give just one reason why OP's suggestion is not viable or realistic.

On international flights, it makes sense to have bi-lingual or multilingual FAs. How can an someone even suggest that an airline fly to a country if at least one of their FA's does not speak a(the) language of the destination country.

I'm a big fan of Google Translate. The verbal conversation mode on my Android phone is super cool -- almost the forerunner of a future "universal translator" that was predicted by Star Trek.

But I chat with a buddy from Brazil who regularly uses it to chat with me online. After awhile, I have had to ask him to stop doing this, because I can't understand what he is saying half the time. My Portuguese isn't very good, but I have a much better chance of understanding his Portuguese than the awkwardly translated English that his translator produces.

I don't think that would work to well in an in flight or on the ground emergency, nor acceptable to the authorities responsible for flight safety. For in-flight service, the system is quite fallible - nyet, no, non, la, ain't happening.

It's Kuala Lumpur ;)

Google translate is a big failure. It works for very simple things (i.e. a word) but it can't translate sentences. I've tried it with different languages and it's awful.

In Europe this is not the case at all. Airlines never staff FAs who speak the local language when they fly to countries where the local language is not of a somewhat significant circulation (German, French, English, Italian, Spanish). You'll never encounter a BA, LH, KL or AF FA speak Bulgarian or the like.

As already stated above, there are canned announcements for the masses, but communication with individual pax is often more nuanced than what can be translated by a Google type device.

(bolding mine)

Especially between English and Chinese. It may serve its purpose as a dictionary. However, there are times Google Translate can't even get the meaning of the (Chinese) word right. Once Google Translate delivered the totally opposite meaning of the phrase when someone showed me an example. :eek:

How would someone come to a conclusion that this sort of translation tools could come to close to replace real people in settings that require intensive, sometimes emergent, human interaction is totally beyond me. :confused:

google translate is ok. With sentences or anything more complicated than a basic phrase, it will at best give you a general idea of what is being said, andthat is at best.

And just how would you know which language the person speaks?:confused: