Travellers in or from East Asia may soon be able to turn to their cell phones for quick, easy and cheap translation help thanks to a new application from Toshiba.

Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.

Google has brought out a translator toolkit that combines the company's machine translation technology with online tools for manually editing content.

As the Internet becomes a more important path for information between Iran and the rest of the world, Google has added support for Persian to its Google Translate service.