Have there been any advances in terms of the creation of a Universal Translator as seen in Star trek?

Question

Have there been any advances in terms of the creation of a Universal Translator as seen in Star trek?

Answer 1

no direct advances.  Language isn't just something that can be easily solved by an algorithm.

Answer 2

Sure.  Altavista introduced the fish.  Google still supports it.

There has also been an advance fairly recently where a computer has "learned" a language by being exposed to lots of printed text - and pieced things together statistically - much the way a baby learns language.  Very cool stuff.

One of the problems with the Universal Translator is that we don't have lots of new languages to try such a product on.  By the time such a tool is working, there will only be a handful of natural languages left to test it on.