Anyone who have ever seen Start Trek knows the notion of the global translator.So no. We are not really there yet for speech, but at least for text Google Translate service is getting very close.
I don't use this service too much, but every time I do use it I'm quite amazed from the results.
For example, yesterday one of our users wrote a post about us in the TWS Italian blog. The post was of course in Italian, a language I like but don't really know.
I used Google translate to translate the page, and the results were really good. I was able to read the full post as it was written in English. Even better. When you click on any of the links on the page, you keep browsing the site, while Google translate every page you go to.
If Google will implement an automatic translation into Chrome, this could really be a way to break all boundaries between communities and people. The only thing that is missing is to also integrate this into twitter/chat/IM so people from different locations will be able to talk with each other with no boundaries and limitations of language.
