I’m in France right now - doing my best with my weak French - and I also happen to be engaged on a learning community project that involves mentoring between Arabic and English speakers. So, when telestic, the maker of an instant messaging application that features real-time, natural language translation dropped me a line, I was more likely than usual to pay attention.

It also helped that, in writing to me,  the company positioned their software, Meglobe, as a language immersion tool and suggested that Mission to Learn Readers might find it “to be a useful tool to assist in improving their … language proficiency.” In other words, they had taken at least a little bit of time to figure out what might be of interest to readers here.

I don’t know whether the company’s claims about the effectiveness of the application as a language learning tool are valid, but I am at least intrigued by the possibilities.  I’m also interested to see how well it performs initially and how it improves over time - the application is designed to learn as the number of users increases and as users edit the auto-translations that are provided by the technology.

I plan to to test it out for use in the Arabic-English project, so I’ll let you know how that goes. In the meantime, if you try Meglobe or already have experience with it, please share your impressions with other readers in the comments here.

Also, check out the tutorial video below (click if you don’t see it) as well as a video on how users can edit translations.

Jeff Cobb
Mission to Learn

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2. 20 Language Links from the Free Learning Monitor