Brad's comments about my blog are good and thought provoking. I assumed that a universal chat translator did not exist, so I never googled for it. It’s a shame that Babelchat has been shut down.

I do however disagree with the suggestion that a chat translator isn't useful. The argument listed above reminds me of the game "telephone". In this game a message is whispered to a player who then whispers it to another player and so on for the whole group of players. By the time the message has reached the end, it is usually garbled even though the players all used the same language. Perhaps more importantly, the argument discusses a hypothetical situation: the translation of a phrase into several languages then back into the original. This is not the typical real world situation where one language needs to be translated to another. In real life, I use Google's translation software to talk to a Venezuelan friend's mother. We will sit in front of the same computer and hold long conversation even though she doesn't speak English and I don't speak Spanish. I have also done this in chat by cutting and pasting English to Spanish and Spanish to English translations into the chat window. For me the idea of a Babelchat is not an experiment - it is merely an optimization of something that already works.

I have to say I'm surprised it's not startlingly obvious.

I cannot stand people who cannot type good english - "how r u ??!!1!!@@ wot?" - so how is a machine meant to translate that?

Secondly, should a machine be handling language, it's going to sound funny. Enough people already don't talk to me because I sound crazy on IRC, broken english and poor translation would only compound the problem.

It's the same sort of reason as to why I don't use my inbuilt microphone on my laptop on skype - it's clumsy, you feel wrong using it, and you have to be very clear about what you are saying before you say it...