Multilingual Instant Chat Rooms

This is an interesting new approach to instant chat rooms that I haven't seen before. BabelWith.Me actually translates the chat text for you as you chat with people who use other languages.

It's really easy to set up, you just go to the BabelWith.Me home page and click on 'Start a Conversation'. This creates a chat room for you and you then just choose your user name. You can then select the language you want to use and send the unique link to the room to the people who you want to chat with.


Here's the link to the room I created, but I'm not sure how long this will stay live: http://www.babelwith.me/CxEr


I'm not sure how well the translation works, but there are quite a few languages to choose from, so why not give it a try. You can also send invitations out through the interface using Twitter, Facebook or email, which could be handy.

• This could be a nice tool to use if you are running a cultural exchange with students from another country.
• You could get half your class communicating in English and half using their L1 and see how well they understand each other (It could illustrate for them the limitations of translation).
• It could just be a nice way to get students chatting with other classes or interviewing people from outside your class (with or without the translation feature).

I hope you find it useful. Here you can find chat activities for students.

Related links:

• AI and Chat Bots for EFL ESL
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
  
• Video conferencing for EFL
• A Virtual World for Facebook Users
• Make your own chat room
• Online Video: As Communication
• Sending Bubble Joy to your EFL / ESL Students
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk
• Great Video Commenting Tool

Best

Nik Peachey