News Archive / Breaking through the language barrier 03.11.2010

Communications technology has shrunk the globe, but there remains one large boundary to all this togetherness: language.

So far businesses can only spread as far and as fast as they can find people speaking a common tongue. However, researchers at IBM may be about to punch a hole through this barrier.

The multinational currently has 100 staff working on an internal project named "n.Fluent" that offers instantaneous translation across a variety of platforms. "We have a web page interface, where you type in a URL and it automatically translates the web page for you," Salim Roukos, chief technology officer for translation technologies at the company's T.J. Watson Laboratory in New York, told CNN.

"We also have an app that you can put on a web page and when users arrive... they can pull down a menu and change the language. "The ability to translate URLs is something that our customers love a lot, because once you translate the page, you can click on all the links and suddenly you are exploring the foreign language web as an English speaker."

At the moment the software is still in development and only available with IBM, but the company's intention is to take the project to market. They are also developing versions for instant messaging and mobile devices.

source: http://edition.cnn.com

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