Apparently Google is hard at work developing software for smartphones which will almost instantly translate foreign languages and hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years, reports an article over on the Times Online.

Google has already developed an auto-system for translating text on computers and covers 52 languages, and if the mobile version works could eventually transform communication in the world’s 6000 plus languages.

Google’s head of translation devices, Franz Och says that Google believes speech-to-speech translation should be possible in a few years time. For it work smoothly you need a combination of high accuracy machine translation along with high accuracy voice recognition which is what Google is working on.

While some translation systems use crude rules based on grammar of languages, Google is exploiting their vast database of translated documents and websites to improve the accuracy of their system. However some experts believe hurdles to live translation are somewhat high.