Language grid playground
Satoshi Sakai, Masaki Gotou, Yohei Murakami, Morimoto Satoshi, Daisuke Morita, Masahiro Tanaka, Toru Ishida · 2009
Various types of multilingual collaboration tasks must be performed in the fields of education, medical care, and so on. Members in such fields need support customized for each field. Therefore, multilingual collaboration tools should allow customization to suit the tasks and circumstances. The tools provided by portal sites such as Google and Excite are not flexible enough to solve the problems in various fields because they fail to support customization. Therefore, we have developed the Language Grid Playground: an environment in which it is easy to make customized multilingual tools. The basic idea is to organize language services in a layered architecture and develop light weight building blocks that form collaboration tools by combining services. Our system, which is composed of components designed in this way, makes it easy to create tools customized for various intercultural collaboration fields. As a practical example, we develop a customized tool for the field of education in just 6 man-weeks. It confirms the efficiency of our approach for developing tools.