Venture funded Language Weaver showed a taped demo of a bidirectional Arabic - English speech translation system, running on a laptop and used to interview informants and suspects in the field. It's not possible to assess its speaker independence and range of domains from a tape of course, but it's a reasonable first draft of something I've wanted since I first read about translator discs in Larry Niven's Ringworld, over thirty years back. Based on the pace of AI to date, I'd more or less given up on seeing it.
