Search engine-based company Google is reportedly gearing up for the release of a mobile phone that would be capable to translate foreign languages almost instantly, the latest reports around the web suggest. It seems that the company is focused on including voice recognition and automatic translation within the device, and that it would take at least a couple of years before the basic system is ready.

As many of you might know by now, the company has already put in place a translation system for computers, which covers 52 languages, including Haitian Creole, which has been added into the equation last week. At the same time, Google has in place a voice recognition system through which mobile phones can make online searches. According to a recent article on timesonline.co.uk, the mobile device is expected to cover far more languages around the world.

The news site also notes that the company is currently working on combining the two technologies so as to develop a software that can translate a caller's voice into a “synthetic equivalent in a foreign language.” The mobile phone would be set up to analyze “packages of speech,” and attempt translation after understanding words and phrases.

“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently,” he adds.

However, it seems that the main challenge comes from recognizing the voice, mainly given the fact that “everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,” as Och says. However, the software should become more accurate as it is used, not to mention that Google is also working on enhancing its accuracy. “The more data we input, the better the quality. There are a lot of language enthusiasts out there,” Och said, adding that help is needed. Even so, it will still take a long time before a mobile phone with these features is launched on the market.