It is the bit about sending the knowledge all around the world that brings them to the 24th annual meeting of the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) in Honolulu. They want to improve the use of both medical cultures, and the combinations of the two on telemedicine, or medical assistance available on the Internet.

Liangvi Cui of Shanghai Jiatong University and Kaisu Zhuang of Brigham Young University's Hawaii campus showed off to some 1,500 high tech telecommunications experts from all over the world a system that not only translates information to and from any number of languages, but allows practitioners, and the layman, to combine the knowledge of both camps, taking into consideration cultural differences.

The cultural differences are large, according to the pair.

"In TCM, heart does not purely mean a hollow muscular organ of humans that by its rhythmic contraction acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of the blood," as it is in western medical schools, Zhuang said.

In TCM, he said, it is "a set of certain functions," including cultural and social ones.

"And blood, " he said, "does not purely refer to the liquid of blood. It has to do with disposition, i.e. the emotional or moral as distinguished from the intellectual nature and compassion, i.e. innermost character, feelings, or inclinations."

The computer-based system, called a "Multilingual Terminology Wizard (MTW) for Online TCM," allows the user to cross reverence the material seamlessly.

According to Zhuang, TCM, which is thousands of years old and still developing, has "its own physiology, pathology, pharmacology, acupuncture, moxibustion, qigongology and so on," all of which need to be combined to vastly different western definitions and approaches.

And it is not a matter of lack of availability, he said.

"Today, we can find a great deal of TCM Websites, thus far more TCM contents than we know what to do with." But, he said "they vary widely in features, services and purposes."

The problem lies in the direct translation, and part of the solution lies in a huge database of information and a key that works on frequency of questions.

"For example," he said, "Yin, Yang, Jing, Qi, Shen, Water, Wood, Metal, Fire, Earth, Channel, Collateral, Heart, Lung, Spleen, Liver, Kidney, Gallbladder, Stomach, Šare at the top of the frequency list."

" The great number of set-phrases mostly in four Chinese characters such as imbalance between Yin and Yang are also taken into account," he said.

But the MTW, which is still in development, eventually will be able to give the reader an interactive choice of levels of translations, direct or "brute" translation, and much more interpretive translation, he said.

Also downstream is the ability of the user to cull the combined sites for Literatures of ancient TCM, verbatim, the same subjects treated in later stages of Chinese literature, and the material in modern English and/or Chinese.

The system he said "will be evolving from a walking dictionary,(to) a working tool, (to) a dynamic wizard, and hopefully, to an intelligent expert."

It will do that, he said, "by taking advantage of information technology, and computational linguistics Š with the support of medical researchers from the East and West."