There's been some buzz in the SEM industry the last couple days about Google's soon to launch cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) feature. Below is how SearchEngineLand.com describes the feature and I am providing some links to the articles I found below:
"Google has a system it expects to debut within a few months that lets you search for information across multiple languages, even if you don't speak those languages. You'll enter what you're looking for, and your search terms will be translated into other languages. Matching pages in those languages will be found. If they are among the most relevant, they'll be translated back into your native language and shown in the search results. "