Skype who roll on with the tagline 'We keep people together, wherever they are' are now in the process of creating real time translated conversations to break the language barrier across different countries and various conversations. This idea was initiated over an year ago with many attempts by the Microsoft research team to make this a success story.Chris Wendt, program manager of the Machine Translation team says “We felt speech translation was a very natural evolution of the text-translation work we’ve been doing,” .This technology would help people from various parts of the world to successfully communicate with others thus breaking the language barrier that might hold them back.

The problems that are faced in creating a technology that translates real time conversations as noted is the 'disfluecy', where there are a lot of pauses and unusual utterances while talking and also use of the social media way of talking or the internet slang. We can understand how extremely difficult it will be  to recognize and translate all possible accents and languages, this initiative by Skype is highly appreciable and would find high level of usage in both professional and personal life.

Once these are fixed, the skype translator is scheduled to be made available for windows 8 beta app by the end of this year (2014). 

Source: The official Microsoft Blog