Thanks to some clever technology, which Sonico suggests is "sophisticated voice recognition and machine translation software," users can communicate clearly and precisely by simply talking into their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Interestingly, it's revealed in the credits to be Nuance and Microsoft Translator powering the app. A simple interface, rather bare on the iPad, shows two button shaped microphones, each with the flag of the country you want to translate from and too. Tap to speak, tap the button again when you stop speaking, and both a written version of your speech and translation quickly appears, along with an audio translation, complete with convincing accent. It's all very simple, mostly accurate and greatly impressive, not least as iTranslate Voice can currently be had for as little as $0.99, an absolute bargain.

The MT evaluation series started in 2001 as part of the DARPA TIDES program. In their current form, the evaluations are driven and coordinated by NIST as NIST OpenMT. They provide an important contribution to the direction of research efforts and the calibration of technical capabilities in MT. The OpenMT evaluations are intended to be of interest to all researchers working on the general problem of automatic translation between human languages. To this end, they are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported, and to be accessible to all those wishing to participate.

Google Translate is currently best known for being a quick and dirty way to render Web pages or short text snippets in another language. But according to Der Spiegel, the next step for the core technology behind that service is a device that amounts to the universal translator from "Star Trek." Apparently everyone from Facebook to Microsoft is ramping up similar ambitions: to create services that eradicate language barriers as we currently know them. Machine translation has been around in one form or another for decades, but has always lagged far behind translations produced by human hands. Much of the software written to perform machine translation involved defining different languages' grammars and dictionaries, a difficult and inflexible process.

In addition to teaching the engine a new language, they also involved members of the community, partners and collaborators to create and review improved versions of the automated translation system, and collect qualitative feedback about each "trained" system. Deploying a system that reaches a certain level of quality allows seamless use with the standard Microsoft Translator APIs, and many scenarios powered by the API, like the web translation widget. Feedback that is generated through these scenarios can be utilized again in the training process – creating a virtuous loop for improving the translation quality.

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.