Google's free online Translate service has been a popular tool, but the company has grander ambitions. In May, it bought Quest Visual, which makes the clever Word Lens app. That involves pointing your smartphone's camera at signs in the real world for instant translations. The technology is to be incorporated into Google Translate. Waygo is anotherpopular example for iPhone and Android, capable of recognising and translating Chinese and Japanese menus and signs – again by pointing a smartphone camera.

Earlier this week security reporter Brian Krebs pointed out an odd glitch in Google Translate. It had to do with the service's treatment of "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text--the string of Latin words that people use to block out space for text on websites and in other designs before meaningful verbiage is added. For some reason, strings of "Lorem Ipsum" were coming back as "NATO." In his post, Krebs works through a few examples and posits a few explanations. Perhaps someone is gaming the translate system for fun, or to get around Chinese censorship laws.

IN one famous episode in the British comedy series Monty Python a foreign-looking tourist clad in an outmoded leather trenchcoat appears at the entrance to a London shop. He marches up to the man behind the counter, solemnly consults a phrase book, and in a thick Middle European accent declares, "My hovercraft ... is full of eels!" Eventually the scene shifts to the Old Bailey courthouse, where the prisoner at the bar stands accused of intent to cause a breach of the peace for having published an English-Hungarian phrase book full of spurious translations. For example, the Hungarian phrase "Can you direct me to the railway station" is translated as "Please fondle my buttocks." This episode is brought to mind by some recently available computer programs that claim to provide automatic translation between English and a number of other languages. Translation software that runs on mainframe computers has been used by government agencies for several decades, but with the advent of the Pentium chip, which packs the power of a mainframe into a desktop, such software can now easily be run on a personal computer.

It sometimes seems as if the highest praise an innovative new technology can earn is a credulous comparison to Star Trek. The Oculus Rift is like the Holodeck; 3-D printers are like matter replicators; Qualcomm is even sponsoring an X-Prize contest to build a working tricorder. And now Skype Translator, a real-time voice and text language translation app currently available to Windows 8.1 users as a public beta, is being widely compared to the "universal translator" that Captains Kirk and Picard used to effortlessly communicate with alien interlocutors. Skype Translator is less capable than that pat sci-fi analogy implies, but its limitations are as fascinating as its formidable technical achievements. Skype Translator performs instant translation of text chats in over 40 languages, but its marquee feature is real-time, spoken translation between English and Spanish speakers. Unlike Star Trek's fictional translator, Skype Translator is designed to emulate a human interpreter who acts as an intermediary between the two primary speakers.

Sometimes you may feel like there's nothing worth reading on the Web, but at least there's plenty of material you can read and understand. Millions of people around the world, in contrast, speak languages that are still barely represented online, despite widespread Internet access and improving translation technology. Web giants Microsoft and Google are trying to change that with new translation technology aimed at languages that are being left behind--or perhaps even being actively killed off--by the Web. Although both companies have worked on translation technology for years, they have, until now, focused on such major languages of international trade as English, Spanish, and Chinese. Microsoft and Google's existing translation tools, which are free, are a triumph of big data.

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In his wonderful book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, the Princeton linguist and translator David Bellos notes the link between early machine translation pioneers and modern philosophers of language--that hopeless pursuit to discover "the purely hypothetical language which all people really speak in the great basement of their souls." When I spoke to Bellos about Google, he stressed that Google's achievements doesn't make Google Translate akin to how human translation actually works. Though a translation is what you get, translation isn't really what Google Translate does. "It's like the difference between engineering and knowledge," says Bellos. "An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly."

During a recent product demonstration at SRI headquarters in Menlo Park, computer scientist Harry Bratt spoke into the microphone of his lab's new translation computer: "Did you hear the explosion this morning?" The recording demonstrates how the computer translates English into the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Also, CNET reviews video cams and David Einstein has advise on digital cameras.] Several seconds later, software written by SRI International scientists piped the question through the computer's speaker -- this time in the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Saad Alabbodi, an Iraqi immigrant posing as a civilian being questioned by a U.S. soldier, answered in his native tongue. There was another pause as the computer translated Alabbodi's reply into English in a mock interrogation that provided another example of how technology is slowly mimicking complex human capabilities such as speech.

There are several seemingly reasonable problems that are exciting and challenging, and yet are currently unsolvable. Solutions to these problems will require major new insights and fundamental advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. Such problems include: World Champion Chess machine, Translating Telephone, Discovery of a major mathematical result by a computer, and so on. Here I will present two such grand challenges which if successful can be expected have major impact on society: Self-Organizing Systems that learn from examples and observations and Self-Replicating Systems that can make copies of themselves.

It's hard for a military to win hearts and minds if none of its members speak the local language. Humans who grew up speaking a language and joined the military are the best solution, followed closely by interpreters recruited locally. For this reason, the military wants a technology that can work as an interpreter in real time--a universal translator, if you will. Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory put out a solicitation for such a device. Their solicitation says they want to conduct research and development in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, text-to-speech synthesis, as well as other speech and language processing technologies.