[ofrzeta]

I don't understand how that could possibly work. You will always need some time window, don't you? Also sometimes the translation of the first word can only be inferred when you process the last word in a sentence (simplified example).

[mosselman]

There are people who do this and that is synchronous enough. So indeed maybe no Star Trek level mouth-moves-and-translation-comes-out, but with 200ms we are getting close to being able to speak perfectly fine with someone who’s language we don’t speak.

[ofrzeta]

I've experienced human live translators and more often than not they paraphrase a sentence as a whole after it is uttered. I couldn't imagine otherwise because you can't start with translating until the sentence is finished by the original speaker. With human translators there's the additional challenge to translate/speak while listing.

[mosselman]

Yes exactly and the EU has meetings this way, so it seems good enough already. I don't think in practice, let's say on holiday, you'd need anything faster than 200ms for the first token. Of course, more speed would probably mean better experience, but it is already well within the realm of fast enough. Accuracy matters a lot more.

[Gys]

You mean the job of a translator is by definition impossible?

Edit: Yes, for sure there will be a delay of a few words or even one or two short sentences. Just like human translators. Not a problem I think.

Edit 2: Very curious why my first comment was downvoted?

[ein0p]

You can’t translate word by word. You need entire phrases, sometimes pretty long ones, to understand the meaning.

[woleium]

sometimes, but in a constrained situation, e.g. at a hotel reception desk, maybe not.

[nmstoker]

So what would you do if translating from a language that puts the main verb at the end of a sentence, into a language that doesn't...

Feels like there will be plenty of cases you can't just get around.

[ein0p]

Not to mention that sometimes you need more than one sentence to get the full meaning

[ofrzeta]

Obviously translation is possible but not "synchronously" as you wish. From what I understand 200ms is "time-to-first-token", so I still wonder how that works because, as I wrote in my comment above, typically there is no one-to-one correspondence of words/tokens from one language to another. (I didn't downvote your comment)