Meglobe: Instant Messaging with Language Translation

I found a very useful, free web based Instant Messaging application called Meglobe that I’ve been using to help improve on my poor Spanish skills. It works by translating your IM messages into the language of the person you’re chatting with. It also allows you to make contributions to the translations it performs and according to its creators the contributions, "teach Meglobe to become a better translator."

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. 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.

I've also had a chance to use Meglobe to chat with other users who live in Germany, Spain, Brazil and Japan and there hasn't been a time when we haven't been able to at least have a basic understanding about what we're chatting to each other about.

Overall, I think Meglobe is a very useful communication tool and I definitely plan to keep using it.