In the April 18^th post,

 http://www.blog.telecomfuturecentre.it/2010/04/18/doesn%e2%80%99t-matter-what-language-you-speak-as-long-as-you-use-a-cell-phone/ ,

I discussed the level of accuracy achieved by Google in translating languages and suggested that they may be coming to a good real time translation through the cell phone by 2012.

Well, we are still two years away, but I can see the first steps being taken: on May 6^th Google has announced an application running on Android phones allowing you to get an immediate translation of a word or a sentence captured through the camera of the phone.

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/translate-real-world-with-google.html

Point and Shoot. Then identify the sentence you need translated and..le voilà!

You can use it to translate from English, Spanish, French, German and Italian into 52 languages. Not quite the real time translation of speech but we are not in 2012 either!