A brief note (press release?) claims:

  "Lotus Ireland, a subsidiary of International Business Machines Corp.,
   said Wednesday it had developed a new software product allowing people
   speaking different languages to communicate across the Web.

  "The new system, called Lotus Translation Services for Sametime (LTSS),
   translates Web chat and communications as typed in real time, and will
   go on sale in September, Lotus Ireland said."

The full note is at:

   http://www.digitalmass.com/news/daily/06/21/lotus_language.html

More details -- including free software -- can be found by going to

   http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/ireland

The page at the "headline link" says

  "The development work carried out by this team consists primarily of
   Java and LotusScript APIs, transports layers, a distributed server
   architecture and some core services."

The longer, more painful page from the press release link in turn
contains a link to the downloadable software (I've not tried it).


What was the name of that HP promo (the second one) shown at Interex
conferences, the one about how (HP) technology could help when the
"big one" hits California?

Remember the scene where the driver of a (stopped) vehicle speaks
in Spanish to a Spanish-challenged fireman?  The speaking is done
into a "palm-sized" device, which repeats what the driver said,
but in English.  IIRC, the fireman then uses the device to
communicate in the other direction as well.

I know we've covered many examples of speech-to-text ambiguity here
before, but could such a device be far away?

--Glenn