Imagine it's the 1950s and you're in charge of one of the world's first electronic computers. A company approaches you and says: "We have 10 million words of French text that we'd like to translate into English. We could hire translators, but is there some way your computer could do the translation automatically?" Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. At this time, computers are still a novelty, and no one has ever done automated translation. But you decide to attempt it.

The guide was written in German, which Casey cannot read, so she typed bits of it into an Internet translation tool. "It occurs nobody endlschleudern, however, intercatapults" is one result she got. Stumped, she pressed some buttons and eventually managed to wash her clothes, in an elongated wash cycle that kept her pinned down for three hours. Libby's quandary will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to use a computer to translate things. For decades, machine translation was mostly useful if you were trying to be funny.

Captain Kirk had the universal translator, Arthur Dent had the Babel fish -- and the rest of us have smartphones. Neither the universal translator nor the Babel fish chew up your 4G data allowance, potentially costing you an arm and a leg on your overseas vacation. Software developers are creating more mobile translation tools that you can use offline. Software developers are creating more mobile translation tools that you can use offline. Luckily for you, though, the translator gap is narrowing as more developers create apps with helpful offline modes that let you do your translating at your leisure, without worrying about the bill.

Though the idea of the "Babelfish" - a thing able to translate between any two languages on the fly - was created by the author Douglas Adams as a handy solution to the question of how intergalactic travellers could understand each other, it could be reality within 25 years. At least, that is, for human language. Prof Nigel Shadbolt, a close associate of the web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says that the idea of automatic machine translation "on the fly" is achievable before the world wide web turns 50. Shadbolt also forecasts that future changes to the web will mean people will be "connected all the time" to medical diagnostic systems – but also that search companies including Google and China's Baidu may face challenges as web use shifts from the desktop to handheld and mobile devices. Having first used the web in 1993, via an early version of the Mosaic browser while on a visit to Canada, Shadbolt now thinks that it opens up huge possibilities for artificial intelligence systems built by connecting computers across the web - so-called cloud computing - that will be able to enhance daily life.

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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