Microsoft's Skype moves toward auto-translation

Vision, schmision... Even Google Translate, with it's nearly infinite communication base, can't properly translate most keyboard-typed English expressions into Japanese (or vice versa), so real-time voice translations are just a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Of course, that hasn't stopped companies like DoCoMo from trotting out this breakthrough promise every other year. Skype is great, but Microsoft should keep quiet until this works flawlessly.

While I agree with you, the gulf between English and Japanese makes machine translation particularly difficult - nearly impossible. But Spanish and English share a commonality, and this makes one-to-one translation much easier than Japanese.

english <-> spanish easy... english <-> japanese horrible ATM

Bear in mind that English is a germanic language and Spanish is a romance language and so they are quite different.

When compared to the difference between Japanese and English, Spanish and English are quite similar.