There’s good news for lonely-hearts and internet chat addicts. For those who babble away in the outer reaches of cyberspace hoping to hit upon a soulmate or just some virtual entertainment, the range of potential chat partners is about to expand dramatically.

Two US-based Lebanese brothers with a nose for cross-cultural business are about to launch an instant translation tool that they hope will untie tongues around the globe.

“We’re liberating the global voice of the internet by empowering people from diverse cultures to interact with each other,” Multicity.com president Patrick Hanash, 31, says in flawless PR hyperbole.

What Multicity’s “state-of-the-art instant translation product” will actually do is translate chat-room text conversations into eight languages - English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

According to Patrick, current technological limitations of major browsers have slowed development for Arabic translation, but it will be added eventually, along with other languages.

Cynics might say that internet chat is a rather puerile world populated by frustrated adolescents obsessed with sex and dating. Yet in business terms chat is the ultimate “sticky” application, keeping users online long enough for advertisers to woo them. Throwing the multilingual software into the ring could increase the number of users and raise Muliticity’s stickiness from its current average of 28 minutes.

The translation tool, due to be launched in the coming weeks, will certainly give the usual monocultural exchanges a novel twist. There will be nothing stopping Brazilians or Italians jumping to German or French chat rooms, while American or Europeans will suddenly be able to communicate with their Japanese or Korean peers.

The true test, though, will be the accuracy of its translations - current tools like Altavista’s Babelfish have enough trouble just coping with basic text. You wonder how the urban slang of English-speaking adolescents versed in rap music and Beavis and Butthead will translate into any of the other languages. Having said that, the inevitable multilingual gobbledygook undoubtedly will provide a few laughs and help break the ice.

It was 29-year-old Alain Hanash, now Multicity’s CEO, who had the original brainwave in 1997 when working as a consultant for Ernst & Young. “Everybody talks about the globalization of the internet, but we still haven’t seen any hint of the internet being a truly global medium,” he explains.

As a Cornell University computer-science graduate, Alain was confident that online multilingual communications tools could be developed to eliminate culture and language barriers. Launched in July 1998, Multicity has already created a cross-cultural chin-wagging network of over 115,000 daily users. Unlike standard chat services, Multicity is an open site that encourages visitors to take various tools from its “global communications product suite” (chat, instant messaging, message board, and voting booths) and incorporate them into their own commercial or personal sites. So when another visitor clicks on the desired chat room, he or she is taken to a Multicity-partner site, where most of the content is controlled by the partner. To date this mini-internet of chat numbers around 60,000 different sites based in 70 countries, using 18 languages.

The Hanash brothers hope that their culturally diverse audience will attract global or regional advertising campaigns. Multicity can then start to beam video clips and advertising banners across the top portion of its thousands of chat room pages.

“Imagine the power for Sony to play a song all over the world, with one click of a button,” says Alain. “Instead of going to different markets, they come to us, we send it over the network, let people listen to it, buy it and download it.”

It is this potential that has attracted  $15 million of investment from Grotech Capital Partners and $1 million from Draper Atlantic. There are no immediate plans to take the company public, particularly with the Nasdaq’s recent dives.

Born in the United States to a Lebanese father and French mother, Patrick believes that he and Alain’s “global view of the world” gives them an innovative edge over their North American counterparts.  The globe-trotting brothers were schooled in France and also lived in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia before returning to America to attend university.

What’s more, Patrick does not rule out the possibility of operating in the Middle East.  “Once the peace process is under way we’d like to open a Multicity office in Lebanon,” he says. “Given Lebanon’s geographical location and its multicultural and well-educated population, it could be the base for our Middle East and Asian operations.”