Shortly after hearing of a simple two-way Spanish-to-English translator for the iPhone, Toshiba has announced that it has developed a new translation system that requires no server-side interaction.

The app is designed to be ran completely on one's mobile phone, which will eliminate costly data roaming fees that are generally incurred using other systems that require an Internet connection to retrieve translations. The system is trilingual in nature, and in essence, it's a smashed version of a PC app that already exists. It enables users to translate freely between Japanese, Chinese and English. Initially, the software employs speech recognition to determine the language and what has been said, and then it uses either machine translation or rule-based machine translation to break the phrases down and convert them into another language.