Sakhr is a translation company with big clients like the U.S. Department of Defense and Homeland Security. They specialize in English/Arabic translation, and this demo of their iPhone/Blackberry app (not publicly available) looks like the Holy Grail of translation software.

You hold a button, say a phrase and the software captures the information through speech recognition. The text is then translated into either Arabic or English (in the cloud, we believe) and then read aloud so mispronunciation is not an issue.

Voice recognition is a hard part. But if an app works even with 85% accuracy, that's close enough for most tourists—even if soldiers could find the mistakes a bit more costly.

via gizmodo