Intercultural community development for kids around the world

Abstract

Communication methods and tools are key factors in developing online intercultural communities, especially when community members use their own mother tongue. This chapter introduces a case of an online intercultural community for international youths in NPO Pangaea. Youths and volunteer staff are from different countries and communication in this community is not English-based. Pictograms are used for youth communication and machine translations are used for staff communication. This chapter reports the participatory design and development processes of a pictogram communication system for youths and multilingual community site for staffs. Community-based communication tools such as Pangaea Staff Community Site receive benefits from the Language Grid technology in its aspect of a collective intelligence, because the Language Grid enables community users such as Pangaea volunteers to improve machine translation quality, for example, by adding a Pangaea community dictionary.