Photos: Tower of Babel crumples with new tech

The electrodes on the face of this graduate student pick up electrical impulses from the muscles flexed while mouthing words. The impulses are then transliterated into language (in this case, English) and can then be translated into foreign languages.

The Translation Glasses essentially feed people subtitles. A computer translates a speech on the fly, converts it into text, and serves it up as written text in the user's native tongue.

"In a Kurosawa movie, you want to hear the samurai grunt in Japanese," said Carnegie Mellon professor Alex Waibel. "I once saw an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie dubbed into German. You lose the whole joke."