Hollister’s Jose Estevan Guzman ran into a problem back in 2002 when he would go on dates to the movies with a woman who didn’t speak English. She was fluent in Spanish, not English, so Guzman would translate the movies for her at Premiere Cinemas.
“I would try not to mess everyone else’s evening out by talking at the movies,” he said of his eventual wife. “We’d have to move to the back rows. It was almost like being on the back of the bus.”
It was that experience – along with memories of translating “The Lawrence Welk Show” for his mother growing up – spurring the career electrician’s inspiration to design what he called a Language Converter and Transmitting System.
Guzman created the design – not a prototype or invention – which can theoretically do audio-to-audio translations in real time. So when an actor on the movie screen speaks in English, the listener can hear the dialogue in Spanish. In real life, it could apply to just about any situation where translation is needed or desired.
Creating the design, though, may have been the easy part in hindsight. After repeated attempts and appeals to obtain a utility patent on it – and about 11 years after he initially submitted his application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office – Guzman finally received word this summer that he now owns the patent.
“I’m 100 percent owned on the patent,” said Guzman, who works for Lockheed-Martin as a union electrician and does photography as well.
He said there are no other designs out there like his – which is particularly unique because of the real-time translations. Guzman hopes to sell it to a company such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard or Dell. Otherwise, he is applying to get on the NBC show “Shark Tank” and just needs to submit a 10-minute video on his design.
“With them buying the patent, then they manufacture it and sell it,” Guzman said.
