DS language tool prevents international incidents

There's nothing more embarrassing than standing in the tastefully decorated lobby of a Japanese hotel, fumbling with an English-to-Japanese dictionary and blurting out, "Your mother was a hamster," when you actually meant to ask for one of those teensy packets of shampoo. Language barriers are tough to overcome, much more so than dandruff.

Luckily, portable consoles can provide a much-needed grappling hook for scaling these wordy walls swathed in obscure grammatical graffiti. Much in the same vein as Sony's own PSP Talkman software, Tabi no Yubisashi Kaiwachou (which either translates to Conversation Notebook for Travelers...or Archaic Speech Patsy for Eels) turns the DS into a fully functional interpreter that translates text, outputs audio samples and generally helps to prevent uncomfortable international incidents. The supported languages are Thai, Chinese, Korean, American English and German, each one released as a seperate volume and accompanied by its own obscenely adorable multilingual mascot. American English is represented by a surprisingly friendly bear, if you must know.

Though Tabi no Yubisashi Kaiwachou was originally slated for a March release, it is now scheduled to hit Japan at the end of this month.

[Thanks, Siliconera!]