A Spoken Translation Game for Second Language Learning

In this paper, we describe a Web-based spoken translation game aimed at providing language learners with an easily accessible and fun environment to practice speaking the foreign language. Our prototype centers on the task of translating flight domain sentences from English to Chinese. The system presents English sentences as stimuli to elicit Chinese utterances from a user. It tracks a user’s performance and rewards them with advancements in difficulty level. A user study was conducted involving 12 learners of Mandarin Chinese. Each participant played the game and answered survey questions. The system achieved 9.7% word error rate on 2834 non-native utterances collected in the user study. All subjects thought the system was helpful at improving their Chinese, and most of them would play it again and recommend it to their Chinese-learning friends.