Google has announced that it is developing software for a phone that can translate speech into a different language almost instantly. I assume that the first phrase it will need is: “I have an app for that.” Speech-to-speech translation should, according to Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.

Seasoned future-watchers may think that they have been here before. On January 7, 1954, IBM issued a press release announcing that it had managed to translate Russian into English using an electronic brain. Although Professor Léon Dostert, the Georgetown language scholar involved in the project, conceded it wasn’t yet possible “to insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other”, he predicted that within three to five years “interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process ... may well be an accomplished fact”.

Twenty-four years later, the fact was still far from accomplished, and Douglas Adams invented the Babel Fish, a small yellow creature that one placed in an ear, and which translated everything instantly. In The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the fish was mind-bogglingly useful, even if it did help Arthur Dent understand Vogon poetry.

The translator phone will require voice recognition. Those of us who have watched a technologically minded friend hurl a phone across a room because it can’t understand the word “Home”, and dial a corresponding number, contrary to the promises made in the manual, will be understandably cautious.

And as for Google’s translation software, I once did an episode of The Book Quiz, on BBC4, in which we had to guess the poem that had been Googlemangled into another language and back again. Only the superhuman detective powers of the multilingual George Szirtes got us any points at all. Even then, the poetry side of things was rather lost: “To survive or not,” Hamlet might say, “this is a problem.”

And take the opening line of Nineteen Eighty-Four, “It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Google it into Chinese and back, and you get, “This is a cold day in the bright April, the clock is striking 13”. The gist is there, but the tense has changed and one of the adjectives has leapt to a different noun.

And perhaps perfect translation would be a problem too. After all, the Babel Fish started a bloody war, as people could now finally understand what everyone else was saying. Maybe saying what you mean in your native tongue, slower and louder while gesticulating is still the best bet. Is there an app for that?

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