DARPA has long been working on making real-time translation systems practical and portable, and it looks like it’s now closer than ever to its goal — although it can’t necessarily take all the credit. The research agency recently teamed up with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (or NIST) to test three different systems as part of its TRANSTAC project, at least one of which relies on none other than a Nexus One to do real-time, spoken language translation from Pashto to English, and vice versa. Of course, specific details on the translation systems are otherwise a bit hard to come by, but NIST is more than happy to draw a few Star Trek comparisons in its demonstration video — check it out after the break.