My first IT job was a brief stint at a small company called Microlytics. My brother worked for them and got me a temp job. Our official job title was called "futzers" and our job was to clean up digital audio files, removing any pops or noise.
They were making a talking Japanese/English translator. They had a guy reading the words in English and recorded on digital audio tape - DAT. It was not a perfect system, so therefore we were cleaning up the audio with a home grown program that let us see visually the sound and could identify what didn't belong and delete those sounds.
Nowadays you can get a franklin 5 language european translator online for a great price and probably mobile phone app that could do the same thing as well. Back then it was cutting edge.
