In any multinational organization, one of the biggest barriers to cross-border collaboration is often language. However, this may soon be about to change thanks to a mobile application being trialled by the US Army in Afghanistan.

Called Transtac, it is being developed by the American government as an Android app that runs on an ordinary smartphone and translates spoken phrases from Dari and Pashto to English, and vice versa.

Google is reported to be working on a similar mobile project designed to leverage its Google Translate technology, which currently covers 52 languages.

Although rumors of such translation devices have abounded for many years, it’s likely that some genuinely valuable software may now be about to surface.

This is thanks to advances being made simultaneously in machine translation and voice-recognition technology. The latter is notoriously complex, largely due to the problem of individual accents — which is why a cellphone is the perfect device on which to run such apps, as it can be programmed to learn to recognize the user’s voice.