Google researchers say that they are working on a mobile phone that can translate calls to different languages.

The hurdles to making such a phone are voice recognition and automatic translation. Although most experts say that these technologies are still not good enough, Google hopes to have their phone ready quite soon.

“We think speech-to-speech translation should work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Google’s Franz Och.

We spoke to an expert, Alan Black of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. He told us what he thought of the best current projects.

“The capability is there,” he said, “but it’s slow and takes too much effort to support new languages. A DARPA project has built English-Iraqi Arabic translation systems and they are usable, but still experimental.”

So what does he think of Google’s plans?
“Google does have good text translation,” he said, “and has been quite successful with English speech recognition. With more powerful phones in our hands and a good network connection to very large computers, this is not so much science fiction as one might think.”