Skype update translates English and Spanish in real time

The world is edging a little bit closer to Star Trek-style universal language translation, as the Skype Translator preview service goes live to select users on Monday. Skype Translator tries to offer real-time translation of both spoken and written communications, so that users who speak completely different languages can converse with one another easily. Right now, the service can handle near real-time audio translation between spoken English and Spanish, and text translation between more than 40 languages. As shown in the video above, Skype Translator will convert spoken English or Spanish sentences to text and display them (and their translation) in a sidebar next to the video stream. A computerized voice will also read the translated text aloud.