Hm. I wonder what effect a more robust, true "universal" translator would have on the diversity of languages in the world? If devices like this became ubiquitous, I could actually imagine that it would protect smaller, threatened languages from extinction, since the pressure to learn one of the dominant languages would be relieved.
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This is incredibly cool, but it's also a gigiantic leap step and a bound away from a universal translator, unless universal translator merely has all known languages programmed in, instead of having a generalizied language converter function to translate to or from an unkown language. Which I guess depends on which sci-fi you read.