As you can probably tell by what I do for a living, I have a good command of the English language. Unfortunately I do not have similar skills when it comes to mastering other languages.

I took two years of high school Spanish and still have trouble ordering lunch in a Mexican restaurant. My wife was born in Italy. You’d think after 36 years of marriage, I would’ve picked up enough Italian to at least converse with her family. Nope. When my wife wasn’t around I had to depend on my kids to translate. Occasionally they would tell me something and then promptly snicker, leading me to believe that something might have gotten lost in the translation. I could never be sure, though.

During a business trip to Germany some years ago, however, there was no doubt things were getting lost in the translation. One evening, bored with watching John Wayne speak to the bad guys in fluent German on TV, I recalled seeing a bar down by the train station and decided to go there for a beer. The place looked more like an old, slightly run-down hotel, but it said “BAR” in big white letters on the building and the place always looked busy at night. Surprisingly busy for such a small town. That was when I found out that “bar” means something different in colloquial German than it does in English. Let’s just say the waitresses were serving more than suds there.

A week later I was in the city of Cologne one evening when two men on bicycles approached and identified themselves as police officers. Since I was working for a German company, I’d been taking classes to learn the language and for some reason I thought that would be an opportune time to demonstrate how much I’d learned. Bad idea! I have no clue what they heard that night, but when they reached for their firearms I was pretty sure it was not what I had wanted to say. Fortunately, the rest of their questioning was conducted in English. Broken English perhaps, but left to my own devices it could’ve been bullet-riddled German!

Hopefully you haven’t had similar experiences, but if you’ve ever traveled abroad you may know how frustrating it can be trying to communicate in a foreign language. Thanks to new technology developed by a company called SpeechTrans, however, that frustration may now be a thing of the past.

SpeechTrans partnered with Nuance Communications, a company that specializes in speech recognition and conversion, to develop a mobile translation app for the iPhone, iPad, and fourth-generation iPod Touch. You can either purchase individual language translators, such as English to German, or English to Spanish, or something called the Ultimate package, which puts 14 different languages – English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Dutch, and Swedish – right at your fingertips, with no limit on how you combine them. Want to translate English into French? Spanish into Polish? Chinese into Japanese? No problem. Just select the two languages involved, type in the sentence, and in a matter of seconds the translation appears on the screen. The software also gives you an audible translation, spoken with the correct accent and pronunciation!

Not a good thumb typist? Hard to believe in today’s texting-mad world, but if so you can simply push the software’s “record” button, speak into your device (or microphone headset in the case of the iPod Touch) for up to 55 seconds, and the software will translate whatever you say. How cool is that? Each time you hit the “record” button, it counts as one “transcription,” and the number of free transcriptions is limited, but you can always buy more as needed. And the good news is that each transcription is saved in memory so you can reuse them.

What the voice feature means, in practical terms, is that you’re essentially carrying an interpreter around in your pocket. Say, for example, you’re in Europe and you need detailed directions on how to go somewhere, including what buses or trains to take, where to get them, where to get off, etc. Under normal circumstances that could be a significant challenge. With this app you merely have to find a policeman or friendly local, whip out your iPhone, explain what you need in English, and have it automatically translated into something they can understand. They then respond in their own language, the information gets translated into English and stored on your iPhone so you can refer to it again as needed to reach your destination.

It sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? I thought so too, but after testing it for several days I have to admit, I’m impressed. So was the Pentagon apparently. They’re reportedly evaluating the technology for possible use by U.S. troops overseas.

The company claims the program’s translations are more than 90 percent accurate. What they don’t say is how it deals with things like regional dialects, which are quite common in many foreign countries. Misspelled words can also be a challenge, which is where the audible part of the program comes into play – if you can’t spell it correctly, hopefully you can pronounce it correctly. And if something should get lost in the translation, at least your iPhone won’t laugh at you like my kids used to do.

Want to learn how to fire a Patriot missile at something? There’s an app for that. No, seriously…there’s an app for that.

According to a press release I received last week, a company called C2 Technologies has just developed the first of what will be 7 mobile iPhone applications designed to train the U.S Army’s Patriot missile crews. The new app, which was created using the Unity 3D game development platform combines video footage of actual Patriot missile crews operating the real thing with the type of 3D animation and illustrations commonly used in video games.

The release goes on to say that when completed, the seven apps will cover all aspects of the Patriot missile system’s operation including march order and emplacement requirements for the launch station, radar, engagement control station, antenna mast group, and the electrical power plant, as well as training in the areas of missile reload and radar maintenance. In essence, everything a soldier will need to know to position and operate the missile system, all on their iPhone or laptop computer. C2 Technologies is also producing a full set of Interactive Multimedia Instructions (IMI) materials for use in a classroom environment to supplement the iPhone apps.

These new apps are being developed as part of the US Army’s Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications (CSDA) initiative, a program designed to make greater use of smartphone technology not just for administrative and training applications, but possibly for battlefield operations as well. At first glance that might seem like a good idea, but let’s think about this for a minute. What happens if these apps should fall into the wrong hands? I asked Kelly Schneider, a spokesperson for C2 Technologies, if there is a way to prevent that from happening, and this is what she said.

“I cannot fully answer this question because of the security of the application, but I can tell you that several steps have been taken to be sure the device does not fall into the wrong hands. For instance, the app is not available for public distribution, it will not be available via the iTunes store, and it will be a limited distribution to particular device id’s [sic].”

Well that’s reassuring. But as we all know cell phones are easy devices to lose or steal, and the iPhone is far from hacker-proof. And not to sound cynical, but if the security-sensitive US government couldn’t prevent thousands of its most secret documents from being stolen and uploaded to WikiLeaks, losing control of a few iPhone apps should be a piece of cake.

Whether you agree with their current strategy or not, I suppose there’s something to be said for the military’s progressive attitude about using things like smartphone technology and social media to advance their cause in the war on terror. Let’s face it, they haven’t had much success tracking Osama Bin Laden on the ground; maybe they’ll have better luck following him on Facebook.