When I was growing up, my family hosted a young girl from Belarus every summer as part of a respite program designed to remove young children from areas affected by the Chernobyl disaster. It eventually became a tradition to host the same girl each year for several years. She became family. Still is.
There's a huge learning curve when it comes to finding a balance between Belarusian and American culture, but none as significant as the language barrier. My parents and I did our best with broken Belarusian. She did her best with broken English. When we had a breakdown in understanding, we relied on pointing and hand-waving, and when needed, running to the gargantuan PC in the corner of the bonus room to search for translations of words and phrases. It wasn't perfect, but it was realistic and worked.
And really, there is a beauty to that exchange. There's something special about navigating the awkwardness and discomfort of language barriers and emerging with genuine understanding and connection. Seriously, it's so special when you see someone's eyes light up when they finally get what you mean and the excited "yeah, yeah, yeahs" that inevitably follow.
But even I can admit there's a real time and place for frictionless communication.
That brings me to one of the coolest devices I've tried out since attending CES 2026. The Vasco Translator Q1 device even made me take back some of the negative things I've said about translators in the past.
Even though the CES show floor is rarely quiet, standing there amid the noise, I found myself having a surprisingly natural conversation with someone I shouldn't have been able to speak with at all.
The Vasco Translator E1 earbuds translate conversations in 51 languages. Macy Meyer/CNET
Her name was Hanna. She's from Krakow, Poland, and during a demo of the Vasco Q1 translator, we spoke for several minutes -- me in English, her in Polish. Neither of us switched languages. Neither of us slowed down unnaturally or repeated ourselves. The translator simply handled the gap between us.
In this particular demo, we used the Vasco earbuds. I spoke in English, but Hanna heard Polish. When she responded in Polish, I heard English. Back and forth we went, uninterrupted and after a few minutes, I stopped thinking about the technology altogether. That's usually the moment you realize a translation product is doing something right.
What stood out even more was that this wasn't even the most advanced setup Vasco offers. The Q1 translator itself does more and, in some ways, feels even less invasive than wearing earbuds.
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