In a few years,you might be able to speak Chinese,Korean,Japanese,French,and English-and all at the same time. This sounds incredible,but Alex Waibel,a computer science professor at US's Car-negie Mellon University (CMU) and Germany's University of Karlsruhe,announced last week that it may soon be reality. He and his team have invented software and hardware that could make it far easier for people who speak different languages to understand each other. One application,called Lecture Translation,can easily translate a speech from one language into an-other. Current translation technologies typically limit speakers to certain topics or a limited vocabulary. Us-ers also have to be trained how to use the programme. Another machine can send translations of a speech to different listeners depending on what languagethey speak. "It is like having a s _ translator right next to you but without disturbing the person next to you,"Waibel said Prefer to read? So- called Translation Glasses transcribe  the translations on a tiny liquid-crystal display(LCD) screen. Then there's the Muscle Translator. Electrodes capture the electrical signals from facial muscle movements made naturally when a person is mouthing words. The signals are then translated into speech.The electrodes could be replaced with wireless chips implanted in a person's face,according to research-ers. During a demonstration held last Thursday in CMU's Pittsburgh campus,a Chinese student named Sang Jun had 11 tiny electrodes attached to the muscles of his cheeks,neck and throat. Then he mouthed-without speaking aloud- a few words in Mandarin  to the audience. A few seconds later,the phrase was displayed on a computer screen and spoken out by the computer in English and Spanish: "Let me introduce our new prototype." This particular instrument,when fully developed,might allow anyone to speak in any number of lan-guages or,as Waibel put it,"to switch your mouth to a foreign language". "The idea behind the universi-ty's prototypes is to create'good enough' bridges for cross- cultural exchanges that are becoming more common in the world,"Waibel said. With spontaneous  translators,foreign drivers in Germany  could listen to traffic warnings on the radio; tourists in China could read all the signs and talk with local people;leaders of different coun-tries could have secret talks without any interpreters there. What's the final destination of inventing the language translators?
To make cultural exchanges between different countries easier. To help students learn foreign languages more easily. To make people live in foreign countries more comfortably. To help people learn more foreign languages in the future.