Your friendly translator

Imagine landing at a foreign airport and not speaking a word of the language.

Do not worry - help is at hand from your friendly personal robot.

Speak to him in English and your frantic request for a hire car or a luggage trolley will be translated into the local lingo.

Papero is the first robot able to translate between languages spoken in slang or a colloquial style.

The machine, known as the Partner-Type Personal Robot, has a vocabulary of 50,000 Japanese and 25,000 English words.

His technology is being tested at Narita Airport in Tokyo in the more compact form of handheld electronic personal digital assistants.

Simply speak English into the PDA and it will talk back in perfect Japanese.

Chris Shimizu, of NEC which created the technology, said it took years to develop devices which could understand different speech patterns, accents and colloquialisms.

'The accuracy depends on the size and quality of the dictionary but it is usually close to 100 per cent,' he added.

The technology will be offered to other airports by the end of the year.