One of the coolest new projects I’ve heard of, and certainly the most interesting application of P2P technology I’ve come across (amazing what happens when you reconceptualize people as something other then consumers), is the Nomad Translation Project (decided lack of released files), which allows a network of translators (like Babels) to do real time translation of audio streams.

Rabble has more details about the project and its deployment for the WSF

Each of the translators has their own computer where they can define what language they are speaking and which language they understand. This means that each translator doesn’t need to know every other language being spoken, or that everything be translated in to a single language like English first. If a translator doesn’t know the language of the speaker, for example, not many Hindi speakers know Spanish, they can listen to the English version, and make their translation based on that.