On frequent occasions it has been up to Ensign Hoshi Sato to defuse a hostile situation with the help of her computerized translator, like in the brush with Romulans in last week's "Minefield." Well, such translating devices are already being deployed in military situations here on contemporary Earth.

An Associated Press article (which can be seen here at CNN.com) reports that if U.S. troops soon storm into Iraq, they'll be counting on handheld computers designed to enable quick translations of time-sensitive intelligence from some of the world's most difficult tongues, such as Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi — normally a painstaking task.

The devices, some already tested in the Balkans and Afghanistan, range from Palm-style handhelds that use English-language cues to play prerecorded foreign phrases, to a two-way voice translator that allows speakers of different languages to "hold a shaky conversation," the AP article says.

Army intelligence has also purchased 1,500 briefcase-sized document scanners that can make on-the-spot translations of written words from such languages as Dari, Pashto and Arabic.

The portable devices are one facet of a broad machine translation effort that combines private industry and universities with military, intelligence and police under the Language and Speech Exploitation Resources, or LASER, a program taking on one of the toughest challenges in computing. The head of that program believes that universal voice translations that go beyond narrow military confines will take decades to perfect.

The development of a Star Trek-like "universal translator" appears to be only a few decades away, but let's hope by then it will be deployed in a much more peaceful context.

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