Virtual Babel: Towards Context-Aware Machine Translation in Virtual Worlds

In this paper, we describe our ongoing research project of Virtual Babel, a context-aware machine translation system for Second Life, one of the most popular virtual worlds. We augment the Second Life viewer to intercept the incoming/outgoing chat messages and reroute the message to a statistical machine translation server. The returned translations are appended to the original text message to help users to understand the foreign language. Virtual Babel provides a platform to study cross-lingual conversations facilitated by machine translation in virtual worlds and we observe interesting phenomena that are not present in document translations. Virtual Babel is aware of the non-verbal context of the conversation. Language model and translation models are trained from collected conversations and are used to generate translations according to observed non-verbal context of the conversation.