He has been managing four different projects, in India, Oregon, Papua New Guinea and Siberia. First, he created a talking dictionary that could be put onto the web. A talking dictionary of Tuvan, a language spoken in southern Siberia, has existed since 2006.

The two villages involved in this project in Papua New Guinea speak Matukar Panau. In 2011, as soon as they were linked to the country’s electricity grid, they almost immediately started using the Internet and the talking dictionary.

In Oregon, meanwhile, many now send texts in Siletz Dee-ni, a language that had only one fluent speaker at the beginning of the project. With his help and that of a few others who had partial knowledge of the language, Dr Harrison and his team have created a talking dictionary of 14,000 words.

Dr Harrison hopes also that the project for the dictionary of Koro-Aka, a language spoken in north-eastern India, will take off. Here, people have been using mobile phones for a long time, so it’s likely that texting in Koro-Aka will become glamorous.

If you are interested in rare languages, you can also read The Rosetta Project and the rescue of endangered languages and ELA (Ay-la).

At the moment, it only does translation between Japanese and English. Some 400 people are trying out the service, and DoCoMo is tweaking it to solve any problems that come up. Testing will end in March at which point hospitals, retailers and tourist-specific services are going to start using it.

Of course, this is nowhere near the ultimate translation system, even if it is a step in the right direction. The pause between speaking and hearing the translated version is only 2 seconds, and Japanese accuracy is around 90%, whereas English accuracy is slightly behind at 80%.

These are not bad results for a mobile phone, but if you want 100% quality and reliability you can only trust a trained interpreter. Ask SanTranslate.