I have the great pleasure of being part of an EU-funded project called KConnect.  It’s a group of academics, health care providers and commercial organisations (such as Trip) working together with the broad aim of innovating to improve search.

One early result has been a collaboration with the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Charles University in Prague to introduce a very nice multi-lingual tool for Trip.  It allows users to search in French, German or Czech, with more languages due in the next 6-12 months.

As you’ll see in the image above we have added a discreet link for ‘language options’ which, when pressed, reveals the three language options.  Once pressed the user can enter search terms in the selected language.

In this second image you’ll see that German has been selected and the search term bluthochdruck added.  This has been translated to hypertension and the results have also been translated into German.

It’s a very simple yet powerful system which will only improve over time as the translations get even better and more languages are added.