Is anyone close to creating a "Universal Translator" as was standard on Star Trek? If so, how long until it reaches the marketplace?
by 
Pointeman1
ANSWERS: 2
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Scientists are no where close. We have yet to see a translation machine that can accurately translate known languages - let alone languages that have not been studied previously. Doing the latter would at the very least require a component that could read minds and yet distinguish between what the speaker is actually intending to say and what they are just randomly thinking (seeing how we think a lot of things we don't say to other people). This might be impossible - though far be it from me to put a limit on science seeing how many seemingly impossible things have been done over the last century. And of course, if we met any extraterrestrials, who's to say that their mental functions would be similar enough to ours that the machine would still work. For more information of the workings of language and the brain, I highly recommend "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.
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Not in the Trek sense, but there are devices programmed with speech recognition that will render known words and phrases in a selection of languages.
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