Google is developing a mobile phone that can act as an interpreter. Google says its device will speech to speech translation almost instantly. The good news for me is that language experts believe the prospect of such technology supplanting the ability to speak a foreign tongue is a distant one.
David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said the problems of dealing with speed of speech and range of accents could prove insurmountable, and anyone who was in today's listening session would have to agree with him.
And let's face it, a return to pre Babel times might not be such a good thing. In Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish was a small yellow creature capable of translating any language when placed in a person's ear. It sparked a bloody war because everyone became able to understand what other people were saying.