Everyone who has ever traveled overseas wants a Babelfish. The ability to instantly translate your words and the words of others in a way that both parties can understand would be the greatest breakthrough in communications technology since the birth of the Internet. Unfortunately, we're probably still years away from that breakthrough. But Sakhr technologies, a contractor for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, has made big progress towards that goal.

They've just come out with an app for the BlackBerry and iPhone smartphones that can translate English into Arabic and pronounce the translation correctly to avoid confusion. Unfortunately this app is NOT, I repeat NOT publically available at this moment. It was built for military purposes, and it'll probably be a good long while before we see it available for civilian use. That said, military innovations (like the Internet) always end up filtering down to the civilian market eventually. It might be a few years, but eventually we'll see the Sakhr app available for mass market use.

As Gizmodo stated this app does not have to be perfectly accurate to be of extreme use for traveler. The ability of the app to translate to either language with equal ease, and then pronounce the translations correctly, would make it absolutely invaluable to world travelers. Here's to hoping Sakhr is able to add in more languages and release a civilian version sometime in the near future. That app alone would be enough to make them a household name.