GULLIVER got to the video advertising Word Lens before I could. Andrew Sullivan marvels that it's "not science fiction". Indeed it looks pretty amazing, though being a Droid man myself I, like Gulliver, am as yet unable to test drive it.

I will say, in the spirit of Christmas grinchiness, that the freeze-frame translation contains several mistakes. The English reads "And it goes the other direction." This is translated word-for-word as "Y lo va el otro dirección". But the "lo" is a Spanish object pronoun (for "it") that shoulnd't be there in subject position, and you wouldn't just say "la otra direccion", but "en la otra dirección" in Spanish. And "direccion" is feminine, so it isn't "el otro".  In other words, it should just read "Y va en la otra dirección".  And this is a simple sentence, in one of the most common pairings (Spanish-English) for translation software.

It's both frustrating and heartening just how slowly computer translation has improved. Frustrating because I, like anyone else, would love to paste the text of a foreign newspaper article into Google Translate and know I could rely on the correctness (and readability) result. Heartening, in that it's good to know not all human abilities can easily be replaced by computers.