Motivation

While there is great hope that the Internet will one day truely be worldwide, mutual understanding and worldwide communication cannot be accomplished simply by running fiber optic cable across international borders. Right now on the net, discussion is dominated by the English language. If we hope to include most of the Earth's population in a global conversation the means will need to be found to connect people across languages and cultures. For fifty years this has been the motivating dream of researchers in the field of machine translation. But, these efforts have not fulfilled the dream. We propose an alternative means to address the issues of translation and cross-border communication. We will implement our proposed alternative in a visually compelling piece of software, the Translation Map, that will faciliate multi-lingual communication between online environments.