Standards for Communication and e-Learning in Virtual Worlds - The Multilingual-assisted Chat Interface

Many of today’s applications embed textual chat interfaces or work with multilingual textual information. The Multilingual Information Framework (MLIF) [ISO DIS 24616] is being designed in order to fulfill the multilingual needs of today’s applications. Within our research activity for the MLIF standard, we developed the Multilingual-Assisted Chat Interface, which intends to help people communicate in virtual worlds with others who do not speak the same language and to offer new possibilities for learning foreign languages. By developing this application, we also wanted to show the advantages of using web services for externalizing computation: we used the same web service for two virtual worlds: Second Life and Solipsis. In this paper, we first propose a short analysis of social interactions and language learning in virtual worlds. Then, we describe in a technical way the features, architecture and development indications for the Multilingual-Assisted Chat Interface.