How important are the words your company uses to describe its products or services? How human beings make choices about the products they buy and the services they use relates directly to the words that are used to market and sell them. Perhaps when machines are the ones doing the buying, they'll be less picky about language. For now, humans are still the ones opening their wallets, and humans are a strange bunch, with very real and emotional reactions to language. Our taste or distaste for a particular term often relates to our upbringing, our culture and even our past experiences.

Having a translator at hand can be quite useful when you are browsing the Internet. With users from different social background and countries coming together, there is always the chance that you stumble upon text written in languages that you do not understand. Often your only option to make sense of the text is to use a machine translation service like Google Translate or Microsoft Translate. Web browsers like Google Chrome offer built-in translation options, others offer add-ons like Quick Translator to add this functionality to the web browser. But browser add-ons or features are limited to one browser, which may not be enough if you are also receiving emails, messages or documents in languages that you are not fluent in.

You are free to download all or part of it for personal use, including study. Feel free to quote from it as you would from a normal book or article. If you want to use it for more than this, you need permission: you can get it by writing to me: doug@essex.ac.uk.

In a landmark step towards increased use of worldwide patent information on the internet, the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Yoshiyuki Iwai, and the President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benoît Battistelli, have signed an agreement which will provide users of the patent system with better machine translations of patents from Japanese into English and then into German and French. The agreement significantly enhances the scope and quality of Espacenet, the public patent information service on the EPO website, by adding an automatic translation tool. "With this agreement, Japan and the EPO have reached another milestone in their long-standing co‑operation to develop efficient structures and services in the international patent system", says EPO President Battistelli. "Making Japanese patents available in English not only brings a wealth of technological information to users in Europe and elsewhere. It also offers an effective and reliable way for engineers, inventors and scientists to take account of the latest Japanese technology when defining their intellectual property strategies, and thus improve the focus and quality of their own work."

The Internet connects the world, but most people are walled off from each other by language barriers. So free online machine translators like Google Translate, Microsoft's Bing and Systran are a godsend. More than 200 million global users click onto Google Translate alone every month, according to Franz Josef Och, who heads the search engine's machine translation group. "Most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate," he wrote on the company's blog earlier this year. Still, Och has no illusions about the challenges of producing readable machine-translated text.

While computer scientists have yet to build a working "universal translator" such as the one first described in the 1945 science-fiction novella "First Contact" and later employed by the crew of the Starship Enterprise on "Star Trek," the hurdles to creating one are being cleared. That is because the practical need for instant or simultaneous speech-to-speech translation is increasingly important in a number of applications. Take, for example, the hypergrowth of social networking and Skype chats that demand bidirectional, reliable, immediate translations. Similarly, when natural disasters strike, the problem of aid workers struggling to communicate with the stricken who often speak other languages can become overwhelming.

A world where there are no more language barriers might not be too far away - online, at least. Skype has released a live translation tool, allowing people to speak to others in another language - even if they don't know what they're saying. The tool translates speech instantly, providing both text and spoken translations. Washington-based Microsoft has released a preview of Skype Translator (shown). It lets people of different languages talk to each other on video calls.

While we wait for Google to release its much-rumoured Babel translation device, the firm has bought an app that is a worthy substitute. Word Lens uses augmented reality to translate text including road signs, menus, newspapers, and more by pointing a phone's camera towards it. Supported languages include Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese - and for a limited time, the app and $10 (£6) language packs are free. Word Lens uses augmented reality to translate text including road signs (pictured), menus, newspapers, and more by pointing a phone's camera towards it. Last month Microsoft unveiled its new Skype Translator technology, which it claims can decode languages in real time.

In keeping with other social media giants, Instagram has decided to offer automatic translation, which the photo- and video-sharing service says it will roll out over the coming month. Wednesday's announcement came just one day after the Facebook-owned mobile phone app revealed it has doubled its user base in two years, now boasting more than 500 million. With 80 percent of Instagram users now based outside the United States, the company is keen to banish any barriers that may hamper people's ability to communicate. "The Instagram community has grown faster and become more global than we ever imagined," reads a post on the official Instagram account. "And we're excited that you'll soon be able to understand the full story of a moment, no matter what language you speak."

For example, type the question, Automated language translation is it an idea whose time has come? Now do the same with this sentence: Reboot your computer and try again. Youll wind up with this: Their computer and attempt still again load. Language translation software isnt likely to allow you to lay off your bilingual staffers at least not right away. But applied with discrimination and lots of preparation, translation tools can be fantastic productivity aids.