The New Media department at BBC Wales had developed an online program that enables anyone reading a Welsh language website to get an instant translation into English, without having to leave the page to access an online dictionary.

The tool, named Vocab, uses a database of 22,000 Welsh words and allows a word's meaning in English to be checked instantly, without the reader having to leave the page.

The program highlights those words which are available for translation. Roll your cursor over any of these and a 'tooltip' box pops up giving the English translation and a 'More' link leading to a full definition of the word on BBC Wales' LearnWelsh dictionary site.

The program can be switched on and off.

The box will also include a link to so that you can go there for further help if you wish.

Vocab became available on BBC Wales' Cymru'r Byd website on November 2, 2004. Other Welsh-language websites will be able to take advantage of the program free of charge.

The program has been made available as open source code and has been designed so that it can be used to translate words from any language into any other language.

We can therefore hope to see a number of exciting new applications being developed.

Imagine...apart from translation programs becoming available for all languages, the potential for 'libraries' of technical dictionaries, made available as downloadable Plug-Ins or Extensions for web browsers, could be enormous.

So, if you were reading an especially interesting online article, written perhaps in excessively geeky-language, you'd be able to look up the defintion of key words, without losing the thread by having to do a Google "define:word" search or access a specialist glossary.

Interesting potential.