NMC Campus Observer

What If You Could Chat Real Time in Any Language?

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 23, 2006 12:07pm

Shall we chat in different languages? This is now something that can be done in Second Life.

If you are in Second Life, you know that the primary communication channel is the text chat area (and if you have been on the internet for more than a few years, you know that this is a communication mode from the 1980s or older).

But a more than significant number of SL residents are not native speakers of English, and we are sure a few of our reades are interested in the use of SL for language communication. So that’s why New World Notes’ A BROTHER-HUD OF MAN describes and shows in video, a rather interesting device created by Yossarian Seattle that can do Second Life language translations in real time:

Still in Beta, Yossarian’s translator operates through a HUD that attaches to your display, allowing you to quickly switch between 10 languages. During an impromptu trial run yesterday, I happened to spot SL visionary Gwyneth Llewelyn in-world, and knowing she was in Portugal, I called her over to an oceanside, and started chatting in her native tongue.

A video of our conversation is here– view as a Windows Media file for best quality, or via YouTube here. As you’ll see, simple sentences come across more or less coherently, while the translation starts running off the rails, the more complex they become. What’s striking is how quickly each of our sentences is translated, coming and going, processed in less than a second.

The video is quick compelling, and we are eager to try out this device, so we hope to get in touch with the developer… and this is one of many things that will open up widely as Second Life technology opens up more connections with web 2.0 tools.