Heard the father used hansard ( verbatim notes of parliamentary question period) from canada to come up with the software because there was years and years of canadian parliamentarians talking and being simultaneously translated into french or english. It was the raw data he nedded to build his instantaneous translation software. It was free. We are not proud.

...as I am alas a monolingual English speaking person.

On another hand, having been a touring performer in the past I had the pleasure of hearing--and the practical futilty of learning--a lot of worldwide languages during brief times in so many places for short periods. As an adult, I've found it terrifically hard to really assimilate/learn other languages, beyond the basic-est bits.

Nowadays, I have used a couple of apps on my phone: iTranslate and Translate Now, but I'm not traveiing currently so can't attest to their practical help in-the-moment.

Apologies I have misread your post!

Drum

PS, and certainly off-topic, I just last week read a novel--John LeCarre, The Mission Song--that is told from the viewpoint a professional interpreter. The first few dozen pages of it were to me really revealing about the skills of interpretation and translation.

But, those apps seem to be for iPhones, not Android.

There should be some Android apps out there, and a couple of the unavailable gadgets I saw use a phone, but I haven't found much at all, or any I trust.

It's most certainly available for Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.translate&hl=en_US

It does precisely what you are looking for with speech.

It also has a camera feature so you can point the camera at historical markers, signs, restaurant menus, etc. and it superimposes the translation over the image.

Make sure you have a good data plan.

Translate between 103 languages by typing
• Tap to Translate: Copy text in any app and your translation pops up
• Offline: Translate 59 languages when you have no Internet
• Instant camera translation: Use your camera to translate text instantly in 38 languages
• Camera Mode: Take pictures of text for higher-quality translations in 37 languages
• Conversation Mode: Two-way instant speech translation in 32 languages
• Handwriting: Draw characters instead of using the keyboard in 93 languages
• Phrasebook: Star and save translations for future reference in any language

Translations between the following languages are supported:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chichewa, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Kyrgyz, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Myanmar (Burmese), Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Serbian, Sesotho, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zulu

Everyone's got Spanish, which is my first need, but this has Polish, which I run into occasionally.

A girl I knew volunteered to translate an article about Al Gore into Spanish but come to find out she didn’t speak Spanish so she just copied the article into a translating site.

They’re just like spellcheck in that they can spell words but they they din’t get context so they’ll put words like there, their and they’re correctly spelled but out if context.

Anyway we all know that the word gore means a violent shedding of blood and so did the translation service. So Al Gores name came out as sangriento, which means bloody. Stuff like that can be very funny and unusable.

The newer stuff must be better by now though.

If you don't mind waiting a couple of hundred years for it.

... unless you work for Starfleet.

Primitive cultures, especially authoritarian regimes and huge bureaucracies, can't be trusted with the technology.

You may end up in a cage of some sort. Or start a war.

Curiously, when you hold a universal translator up to Trump his words go away and all you hear is the quacking of an angry duck.

Google Translate, for example, is getting better than it used to be, but its translations are still sometimes wildly inaccurate to the point of hilarity. It does a better job with languages that are closely related structurally to English, but even then it often misses the mark, especially where colloquialisms or figures of speech are involved. When you're looking at a written translation at least you have time to figure out what it really meant, but an instantaneous translator that gives you or the other party to the conversation a bad translation could cause some very uncomfortable misunderstandings.

It seems to get gender wrong alot.