What about a translator that can translate languages and send it back to you as text? New glasses will translate languages and read the translation in your language as text on a screen. As switched.com wrote about the language translator “the microphone picks up the conversation, and then transmits it to a small computer around the wearer’s waist. The computer sends the data to a server which does the actual translating. The freshly baked translation then comes back and is displayed as text on the retinal-display. ”

Unfortunately this system really isn’t fast enough to translate languages on the fly. You’ll probably have to ask the person to speak slower. Still this is a step in the right direction and probably going to have all of us looking goofy when we travel in the near future.