Shortly before we were off to Developers Conference, our dveloper program evangelist Lester [announced the winners](http://share.skype.com/sites/devzone/2006/06/api_contest_results.html) of the competition we held to all Skype plugin developers. We got some really interesting ones and if you're interested in how you can extend Skype with plugins, I encourage you to check out them all.

I took a look at one of them, [TranSkype by TransClick](http://share.skype.com/directory/transkype/view/). It's a plugin that translates chat messages on the fly. In the current version, it shows both original and translated version, but their folks also showed me a web-based version where the translation is completely transparent so that you may even not know what language the other parties are speaking.

There are obviously many challenges with machine translation, such as getting the context right (we all know the stories about goofs like "car-flavoured marmalade" and "the spirit is strong but the flesh is weak"), making it understand various idioms and all that. TransClick is putting work into making it work with context-based dictionaries, learning-on-the-fly etc. Interesting.