The tool, dubbed 'PanImages', which was recently presented at the Machine Translation Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, allows people to search for images on the Web using hundreds of languages.

Search engines such as Google look for images by detecting the search term in captions and other nearby text. But since the process looks for a string of letters, the results are limited to the seeker's mother tongue.

PanImages, from the Greek prefix, "pan," meaning whole or all-inclusive, automatically translates the search term into about 300 other languages, suggests a few that might work and then displays images from Google and the online photo database Flickr.

PanImages promises to help people who speak languages that have a small Web presence.

'Imagine you are a Zulu speaker looking for a picture of a refrigerator', said Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 'You type the Zulu word for refrigerator ("ifriji") into an image search and get two results. The same search using PanImages generates 472,000 hits.'

In a test of so-called minor languages, PanImages was able to find 57 times more results, on average, than a Google image search.