TransChat: Cross-Lingual Instant Messaging for Indian Languages

We present TransChat1, an open source, cross platform, Indian language Instant Messaging (IM) application that facilitates cross lingual textual communication over English and multiple Indian Languages. The application is a client-server IM architecture based chat system with multiple Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) engines working towards efficient translation and transmission of messages. TransChat allows users to select their preferred language and internally, selects appropriate translation engine based on the input configuration. For translation quality enhancement, necessary preand post-processing steps are applied on the input and output chattexts. We demonstrate the efficacy of TransChat through a series of qualitative evaluations that test(a) The usability of the system (b) The quality of the translation output. In a multilingual country like India, such applications can help overcome language barrier in domains like tourism, agriculture and health.