Will Google's Translator Phone Lead Us to Babylon or Babble On?

Google's revealed it's working on extensions to its smartphone voice-control powers, debuted in the Nexus One, that'll automatically translate between languages. It's the stuff of pure utopian science fiction. But is it a good idea?

Google's plans are to enhance the remote server-processed speech recognition systems in the Nexus One to include automatic, fast and accurate machine translation between languages, with a synthetic voice output.

Sci-fi fans will of course immediately associate...