It looks more like something you would use to get beamed up to the Enterprise, but the
Ectaco SpeechGuard is one of those newfangled devices that just might make
traveling in distant lands a bit easier. Originally developed for the US Army (i.e. Where is Osama’s cave? in Arabic),
the SpeechGuard comes in waterproof casing (good for diving? Does it come with a fish language translator?) and is
about the size of a Palm PDA. It has a simple interface with categories like “traveling” “restaurant” and “sightseeing”
that might ease the burden of flipping through a phrase book to find out what you want to say. The device currently
providees translations in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Arabic, French, and Hebrew.