And accents and speech impediments supposedly mess it up worse than they did voice dictation software a couple years ago.

I think by a universal translator, wildman was talking about a computer system that could assign known values to unknown works, grammer and semantics. Hate to say this in front of my computer, but computers are stupid. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra." Until they can find a fully functional telepath and can successfully clone them with their paranormal talents being duplicatable, AND put the brains of these clones into a fishbowl and wire it up to a motherboard, I don't think we'll ever be able to do that. We'll have to use pictoral math, certain tables of constants and the periodic table to start, along with a LOT of play acting.