A staple of science fiction is the common language that audiences take for granted, which is used so that communication can be undertaken one-on-one without every line of dialogue needing to be repeated by a translation character – effectively breaking up the action and boring everyone to death. Douglas Adams famously poked fun at this with the babelfish, a parasite that lives in ears and translates language as a food process. Unlike many sci-fi predicted cultural changes that serve utilitarian purposes, enforcing a common tongue is one that proves to be a little too imperialistic for us.

Lexifone figured it out though, and instead of suggesting that we merge forms with scary ear-fish, the company is looking to technologies from the past instead of the speculative future ones. The telephone is the medium that the Israeli telephony company has chosen to bridge the troublesome canyons of language differences, and is set to triple its annual sales with it.

The service uses real-time automatic voice translation over the phone, and it doesn’t even require the Internet. Using a platform of various translation services underneath its Language Optimization Engine, Lexifone wants to bring the phone back into business. Hotels, customer service, international business – all of these stand to benefit from the service that provides translation in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian and Mandarin.

Lexifone admits that the translation will not be perfect, as is the nature of allowing for people to speak in their own dialects and vernacular. Some things simply won’t translate and there will most definitely be some troublesome and occasionally hilarious errors. Anyone who speaks multiple languages will be able to tell you that nothing truly compares to real human translation (yet), since expressions have complex etymologies that simply have no one-to-one conversion.

That having been said, the translation service, currently available for Android (News - Alert) OS and coming to iOS in the near future, is the only service out there that allows for this kind of near-universal communication. If anything, this kind of service will keep the telephone alive in business sectors for a little longer until VoIP and VoLTE services offer something similar, all the while allowing for people to maintain real connections with partners of different cultures. Learning a new language isn’t the same as dialing a phone number, but it’s getting close.