Here’s a useful tool to assist in the learning of a new language or just communicating with people around the world in different languages. It’s called Meglobe, it is a web based instant messaging (IM) application that also performs language translations.

It’s very easy to use, just type in your own langauge and Meglobe will translate your message into the language of whoever you are chatting with. I recently had an opportunity to test Meglobe with an uncle in Mexico who I’ve never spoken to because of my poor Spanish and his almost non existent English skills.

My initial impression was that we were going to have some trouble communicating because of the poor translation quality you normally get with Machine Translation (MT) products but actually I was impressed. There were only a couple times when some of the translations didn’t look quite right but when that happened we used Meglobes contribution feature to make some quick edits to the translations. Since the UI is very crisp and easy to use and there’s nothing that needs to be done in order to use the translation features my uncle didn’t have any problems using Meglobe the first time out.

You can take a look at: www.meglobe.com