TranSqueak - making the world a smaller place: on-the-fly translation of Etoy projects and instant messaging

This work presents an extension to the existing multilingualization work (ml7n) which allows people to collaborate on Squeak Etoy projects across different natural languages. Squeak etoys support several languages, both ISO-Latin based ones (erg., English, German, French), and nonISO languages (e.g., Japanese). Switching between languages for the Etoy tiles is fairly easy to support as the tiles provide a predefined set of words and phrases, which only need to be translated once. There are two areas where we need to go beyond the predefined and pretranslated set of phrases: user supplied names and communication between collaborators. This work presents an approach based on online translation services. We demonstrate a working prototype and a first analysis of the feasibility of this approach.