Kimiko Fukuda always wondered what her dog was trying to say. Whenever she put on makeup, it would pull at her sleeve. (1) When the dog barks, she glances at a small electronic gadget (装置). The following "human" translation appears on its screen: "Please take me with you." "I realized that’s how he was feeling," says Fukuda. The gadget is called Bowlingual, and it translates dog barks into feelings. People laughed when the Japanese toymaker Takara Company made the world’s first dog-human translation machine in 2002. But 300,000 Japanese dog owners bought it. (2) "Nobody else had thought about it," said Masahiko Kajita, who works for Takara. "We spend so much time training dogs to understand our orders; what would it be like if we could understand dogs " Bowlingual has two parts. (3) The translation is done in the gadget using a database containing every kind of