Availability of multilingual chat communication in 3D online virtual space

Abstract

There is a possibility that a 3D online virtual space can become a more familiar communication medium because of the widespread use of the Internet. However, language differences pose significant barriers to intercultural communications. We have developed a multilingual chat communication support system in Second Life as an initial research. Second Life is one of the most popular 3D online virtual spaces in the world. We have carried out a multilingual chat communication experiment in Second Life. From this experiment, we have found the following. (1) It is important that a machine translation machine make it visible in a 3D virtual space. A user can easily learn the usage of a machine translation. (2) There is not understanding other party's language in the problem because appearances of each avatar are free. It is important for users to show translation language pairs not to give confusion. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.