For 'a few years' time' though...
Google is working on speech-to-speech translation technology that could let mobile users speak into their phones, then have their words translated on the fly.
"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time," the company's head of translation services Franz Och tells the Times.
"Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on."
The technology would be based partly on Google's existing voice recognition, which has already been deployed in its Google Maps Navigation app for Android.
Meanwhile, Google has an online text translation service covering 52 languages. Combine the two, and you have - as the Times notes - something not entirely dissimilar to the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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Author Douglas Adams would presumably approve - although perhaps not, given that he'd almost certainly be on Team Apple rather than Team Android in the smartphone wars.
