I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Garr of IBM’s Application and Integration Middleware Software (AIM) group (WebSphere), this morning about IBM’s WebSphere Translation Server (WTS) 5.0, which was announced at Lotusphere last week. I have to say I’m impressed. If you are not familiar with it, WTS it is middleware that provides the capability of translating text from one language to another, and with this release they are up to nine languages, which include traditional and simplified Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. If you don’t ever have to translate from one language to another you probably wouldn’t care, but for the millions of people, just in this country alone, that don’t have English as their first language, being able to read documents, web sites, and myriad other kinds of text, without having to find a translator, is a godsend.