Language Grid Toolbox: Open source multi-language community site

With the development of the Internet environments, more and more machine translation tools have become available on the Web, which provides the opportunity for some multilingual communities to use machine translation for communication. However, there exist several major problems in machine translation tools available on the Internet. 1) Translation for specific terms or sentences within communities is always of low quality. 2) Most of the available machine translation tools only provide basic functions of translating sentences, documents or Web pages, and lack necessary communication functions for community users. 3) It is difficult to conduct collaborative work among community users. 4) There is no support for creating customized multilingual environments based on unique community requirements. To address the above issues, we develop the Language Grid Toolbox which enables easy creation of multilingual community sites and customized multilingual environments for communities. For example, Toolbox has the basic function of creating language resources like dictionaries, which are used to combine with atomic translation services to improve the translation quality. Further, since Toolbox is developed as open source software and provides many basic APIs that can be used for communication, customized functions for communities can be easily developed. Several customized communication tools that are extended from Toolbox basic modules have already been implemented by universities and local government.