Chat via instant message in 15 different languages using MeGlobe

Posted on November 4, 2008 at 5:23 am

Here’s a cool new service that I just run across today: MeGlobe. It’s a free online instant messaging service with instant multilingual translation between 14 different languages. So if you want to chat with someone who only speaks French, you can type in English and the instant message will be translated in close to real-time to French and sent!

Now that’s pretty cool! Actually, this is something Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, and all the other major players should already have! The ability to have your text translated from one language to another instantly greatly increases the number of people you can communicate with.

So what exactly are the advantages of this type of instant translation IM chat?

A doctor in the US can now collaborate with a doctor in France about a possible treatment for a patient
John Doe can plan a trip to Russia and chat with actual Russians about the best places to visit, etc
Sports fans from around the world can talk about world sports events like the Olympics

There are actually a host of other reasons why being able to chat with someone who only speaks their native language can be useful. The cool thing about MeGlobe is that it doesn’t require any software install, etc, it simply works inside the browser window.

To get started, all you do is sign up for an account and then search for people you would like to communicate with. Using the Find Someone feature, you can search for people by country, location, activities, interests, gender, or primary language.

So you might be wondering how good this translation can possibly be since it’s all done by a machine? And that’s where MeGlobe understands that a computer translation can be quite off and sometimes laughable, so they created a proprietary technology called the Learning System, which basically allows users to edit a translation if they find it to be incorrect and which then helps to improve the overall translation algorithm.

The more people that edit translations and make them better, the better the future translations will be. Once you create an account and log in, you can either invite a friend or click the Find Someone button at the bottom left toolbar:

You can also click on the Translator button, which is the icon to the right of Find Someone button. Here you can actually test out the various instant translations by choosing the language you want to translate your text to.

I have no idea if that is a good translation or not, but hopefully so! Currently, they support translation between English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Traditional and Simplified.

So definitely check out this cool service and if you know more than one language, help the project by editing the machine translations! Enjoy!

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