Speak It in Chinese, Hear It in English

From Newsweek:

Alex Waibel doesn't understand Chinese, but he can read street signs when in Beijing. A team of engineers led by Waibel at Germany's Karlsruhe University has developed a heldheld device called the Sign Translator. It uses an integrated camera and software that recognizes, and translates into English, about 3,000 Chinese characters.

The Sign Translator is the cutting edge of a raft of breakthrough developments in translation technology coming down the pipeline. Governments in Europe, rather than corporations, are driving much of the innovation—and with good reason. Consider the European Union: in Brussels, the world's largest translation and interpretation operation spends more than $875 million a year ferrying information in and out of the bloc's 21 official languages.