The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) brought together speakers of six different languages for a six-hour conversation last week.

SuperPower Nation Day was billed by the BBC as "an experiment in multi-lingual debate and discussion." The event involved participants communicating with each other by phone and internet via a hub of translators gathered in London.

While humans from the BBC World Service provided translations of messages relayed by phone, Google Translate was used to convey web messages in real time.

Users communicated in English, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Persian, Indonesian and Spanish using the automated online translation tool.

Whether the internet is a right or a luxury was among the questions discussed by the multinational, multilingual virtual gathering.

The event was also host to a live reading of scenes from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

The BBC described the quality of the machine-generated translations as "not perfect, but intelligible."

"It's about trying to get the message across," said Chewy Trewhella of Google, adding that users were "happy with 80 to 90 percent effectiveness."

Geoffrey Bowden of the Association of Translation Companies (UK) echoed the views of many linguists when he told the BBC that automated translation posed no threat to human translation services.

"It may be the translator becomes more of an editor," he said.

Google Translate was pioneered in 2003 by Franz-Josef Och. By 2010, it was able to translate into 52 languages, including Haitian Creole, added to help with the aftermath of January's devastating earthquake.

21 March 2010