New software being developed at Lotus development could see e-mails, documents and Web pages being translated into 15 different languages quicker than any human translator.

Lotus's worldwide machine translation project, which is being developed by Irish software engineers in Dublin in conjunction with Lernout & Hauspie of Belgium, will be far quicker than any existing method with the ability to translate as many as 400,000 words per hour.

Director of Technology at Lotus Development Ireland, Dr Alan Barrett said "this will revolutionise the ability of multinational corporations and users to co-operate across countries and eliminate language barriers".