Yes, it turns out that learning languages is one of those skills that humans, even relatively young ones, master seemingly magically. It is all enough to make a mainframe computer envious.

At IBM, a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers , is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant messaging between speakers of two different languages.

The project, called n.Fluent, is intended to teach the computer terminology that is specific to IBM's businesses and, more significantly, to allow the computer to learn what it has been doing wrong. To that end, the company is extracting and organizing contributions from IBM's 400,000-member work force spread across more than 170 countries, adding a human touch to the project.

Over a two-week period last month, the company issued a "worldwide translation challenge" to its employees, using a points-based system to award the biggest contributors prizes that were converted to charitable donations. About 6,000 IBM employees made improvements in 11 languages to more than two million words of text translated by n.Fluent.

So, when a machine translation from French produces, "MTTP is the time of 30 minutes and it is steadily declining since January 2006," a human correction comes up with this improved English version: "The MTTP delay is 30 minutes and it has been steadily declining since January 2006."

"From this parallel data , we update the models," said Salim Roukos, a researcher in language-related technology at IBM's T.J. Watson Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, home of the n.Fluent project. "You want to learn the idiomatic expressions -- when you say someone has kicked the bucket, you don't want that translated word for word."

So far, n.Fluent is used only by IBM, but the intention is to create a product that can be sold to other businesses.

Efforts like this at IBM, as well as social networking tools behind the company's fire walls, amount to a new twist on "crowdsourcing," the term IBM officials use to describe them. In addition to the n.Fluent project, IBM has its own companywide version of Wikipedia (Bluepedia), with contributions from 1,300 employees. (continued...)

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