On dubbing: it's rather similar to simultran in that subtitles (which I always prefer even when I don't understand a word of the original soundtrack), demand concentration, and most people want easy listening/viewing from their TV. Good dubbing (and movie dubbing in France is, with a few exceptions, first-rate) can bring things to the attention of a much wider audience.

Either way, translation is not just a technical word-for-word exchange. It always bears a more or less important layer of cultural transfer, by which I mean that entire elements may be transposed into frames which are readily understandable by the target cultural group. Who the furriners are, and what frames they think in, may get fogged in the process.

In other words, whether you simultran, subtitle, or dub, the result in terms of genuine exchange of ideas depends hugely on the intention (make it easy or make it right?) and the expertise of the translator. Same would be true of more ambitious automatic tran software. It's the quality of the human expertise that goes into software that makes it good. (I still regret that artificial intelligence and expert systems, which were supposed to be the coming thing in the late 1980s, got scrapped because of high R&D costs and because Bill Gates had a fortune to make forcing everyone to pay a toll for his pretty stupid software.)

Merkozy and Sarkel? (If those two get in, which God forbid, I think that's what we'll have to call them ;-)) Sarkozy likes to show he speaks English. I imagine Merkel speaks it too.