Francis Tan over at The Next Web has picked up on a concept device from Samsung called “The Real Translator.”

It supposedly works by holding up the device equipped with a transparent AMOLED while facing the person you are talking to. The device will then interpret whatever is spoken in real time and give a rough translation on the spot.

These sorts of reveals go a long way to whet the appetite of gizmo lovers who read gadget blogs but most of them turn out to be vaporware, casualties of the shifting sands of the open market and the whims of the technological winds. However, once and a while, we a concept device crosses our desk that we can probably develop with the technology that we have right now.

For example, Google already has real-time translation services that use cloud-computing as their resource to swiftly bridge the gap between languages. It’s not perfect, but as a service these sorts of real-time translation and language crunching services will need lots of user testing to get them into the mainstream. Certainly, there’s already an Android app for this particular element of the device.

As for, “how do you reply,” how do we already do this? You could just speak aloud, have the device translate it and then show it to the other person, or you could have it read the translated text aloud to continue to conversation. Ideally, both people in the conversation would have devices much like this, linked together and aware that a conversation was taking place. As each person spoke, each device would update with the current translation of the entire conversation across the screen allowing each person to interact on a highly present level. The awareness of both sides of the conversation, in fact, might be the tipping point for a lot of translation software when it comes to context sensitive wording.

For the display: we already have AMOLED technology appearing in devices and transparent screens aren’t a big deal. In fact, Samsung seems to be on the forefront of utilizing this technology—that’s probably why it appears in their concept device.

This is all part of a next-stage technological revolution about using technology to bridge gaps between people-people and people-cloud. Augmented Reality. Using computers to give context to things that are otherwise static, like attempting to translate conversations. Two people from entirely separate languages, able to hold up their smartphones or other handheld devices, and then hold a conversation where they spend more time looking at the other person than the device would be the next-best-thing to actually hearing understandable words coming out of the mouth of the other person.