Tracking Nuheara's commercial success, page-54

Even better: instead of seeing text, it reads out the translation to you. So the person in front of you speaks a foreign language, you hear what they're saying in your own.

Not at all hard to do. It's purely something that would be software driven rather than hardware driven. The only thing that the IQbuds themselves have to do is mute or silence out the voice of the person you're speaking to and feed it to the voice-recognition translation app on your phone and then feed you the translated readouts. The app on the phone could simply be google translate.

Of course, google translate won't give you PERFECT translation every time but it'll at least enable you to have some communication rather than none.

As the voice recognition and translation accuracy gets better over time, it can only improve the whole experience.