Lost In Translation : Google Faces Significant Challenges To Build Babel Phone

Anything too complicated and the translation engine goes berserk and delivers content that's very often out of context. There's also the fact that only one percent or so of languages are catered for, that's still 3600 possibilities. Getting the 6000 or more languages in the set would imply nearly four million permutations.

Of course, the phone will also have to deliver the goods, that is, convert the text into speech via a voice synthetiser. Electronic pocket dictionaries do a fairly lousy job at it and unless you invest in a complex but expensive language tool, the results are likely to be below your expectations.

If that wasn't difficult enough, all the calculations will have to be performed in quasi real time by a mobile phone whose computing power is roughly equivalent to a 10-year old computer.

This can possibly be resolved - at least in some places - by making use of Google's infrastructure but you'd need to be connected to access it. Bearing in mind that there's no mobile network reception in areas like Lake District, that would only be a palliative solution.

To make real-time, universal translation happen therefore would require a massive improvement in processing power on smartphones. Before this ever happens, one can expect translation and text to speech solutions to appear on sites like Youtube.