We have the same issues here, Toronto being voted the most multicultural city in the world. It annoys me to no end how much of a language barrier we have. not to mention the dialects and slang (
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What we need is a realtime Universal Translator. From what I remember, they have the technology but the computing power doesn't yet exsist to translate the words in real time. Not to long from now though.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com...translator.htm
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Work on ViA's universal translator began about two years ago as a way to ensure that people of different languages can communicate with each other in life-and-death situations. Robert Palmquist, ViA's vice president of innovative technology, described the tragedy that sparked the development of the ViA translator. A few years ago, several people died in a fire in St. Paul, MN, because firefighters were unable to communicate effectively with the victims. Non-English speaking residents of the building were trying to flee, but misunderstood where the firefighters were telling them to go and walked directly into the fire. It's possible that if the firefighters would have had a translating device, the fatalities could have been avoided.
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Language barrier or not, no firefighter is going to convince me to run INTO a fire. :roll: