Next time a Chinese waiter looks at you expectantly and say: “Ni xian dian shen me,” all you have to do is reach for your mobile phone. Not only will it tell you that your waiter is asking what you want to order; it will translate your order into Chinese. Or Japanese, or German. The system, called Verbmobil, can translate basic spoken English, Japanese, Chinese and German almost instantaneously. It operates over standard mobile phone network-just dial the number, get the waiter to speak into the phone, and listen when it translates his words back to you. Text-based translators like ‘Alto-Vista’s Babel Fish have existed for some time. But their translations are often poor. The problem is even more difficult with spoken language because of background noise and people’s tendency to use ungrammatical sentences. Unlike other translators, Verbmobil-which is the product of a $94-million research program-doesn’t filter out background noise. Instead it tries to make sense of it, discarding words that don’t fit. The translation often arrives back in a kind of pidgin language, but people still understand. Developer Wolfgang Wahlster from the artificial-intelligence research institute DFKI in Saarbrucken, Germany, expects the service to be commercially available within five years. Instantaneous translations of long phone conversations will take up to 10 years. He says early tests have shown the system is 90% accurate and quick. The delay in translation is no more than a few milliseconds. Anything to get food on the table a little faster. The situation in paragraph 1 would probably take place in a………