"Handhelds from Hewlett-Packard and IBM with built-in talking capabilities are still in development. But one talking PDA, known as the Phraselator, is due to be shipped in the next few days to U.S. troops in Afghanistan....

VoxTec's Phraselator can translate among hundreds of languages. The 500 devices on their way to Afghanistan have preprogrammed phrases already translated to Urdu, with different tones for the announcements, said Marine Acoustics spokesman Bernie Patterson.

A stern, authoritarian voice shouts certain phrases such as 'Halt!' and 'Drop your weapon!' while a more gentle tone is used for phrases like 'Can I help you?'...

Among other talking gadgets, IBM is working on a translation engine available on the Web from AltaVista for its devices. And HP has a prototype device called "The Translator" that is actually a working Jornada with three existing external elements--a camera, a scanner and translation software--attached to it.

The Jornada uses the camera to take a photograph. An optical scanner then lifts the text off the photograph and sends it to the translation software. There, the phrases are matched against thousands of phrases on tap." [ZDNet News]

These could be pretty handy at libraries that have multi-language populations, too. A "can I help you" version, not the "drop your weapon" one, of course.