"Ya know -- I'd be willing to suspend my disbelief on the universal translator concept a bit more if they would have done it in a fashion similar to the scene in the first Dune movie."

Yes that was quite believable, since the device would have been programmed with translation software for known languages.

Some future predictions have worked. Asimov's stories featured hand-held computers, and he effectively forecast the Web with the concept of Multivac, although that was a single gigantic, all-knowing server with terminals all over the world rather than distributed networking.