Universal Translator in progress…
IBM just announced its real-time speech-to-speech translation research. This is according to it’s website:
The goal of the Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2S) research is to enable real-time, interpersonal communication via natural spoken language for people who do not share a common language. The Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR) system is the first S2S system that allows for bidirectional (English-Mandarin) free-form speech input and output.
If you follow Star Trek, we are supposed to have a “universal translator” or “UT” in 2151. Let’s hope IBM can get a full working version out before Star Trek’s prediction. 
Get more Star Trek stuff here.
Personally, I hope the Mac OS interface will strive to lead till the 22nd century. The current speech synthesis and recognition built into OS X is actually not bad and the new OS X Leopard is going to have a more natural speech synthesizer.