OFT – On the Fly Translation.

Ok here’s the idea. Trillian, an IM client, recently has tied itself into Wikipedia.org’s web services. So whenever any word is typed by anyone that exists in Wikipedia, a special underline marking appears under the word. If you mouse-over the word, a tool-tip pops up with the Wikipedia description of the word.

The idea is to do exactly the same thing – but tie it into a translation service. I guess there would be a little more to it, because you would want to translate entire phrases if you could, not just single words. In addition, you’d want to specifiy what language to translate TO/FROM for a particular user. For example, say you have a Spanish speaking friend – you would set it to that the web service would attempt to translate spanish words and phrases that yoru spanish friend sent to you into English.

Phase 2 of this would be to enable outbound translations – so you could type in english and have it translate before sending off to your friend.

Now, if anyone for any IM client builds this feature – you must name it BabelChat or something in respect to The Tower of Babel and of course the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.