Intercultural Collaboration Support System Using Disaster Safety Map and Machine Translation - Culture and Computing - page 100

Intercultural Collaboration Support System Using
Disaster Safety Map and Machine Translation

Yoshiyasu Ikeda, Yosuke Yoshioka, and Yasuhiko Kitamura

School of Science and Technology, Kwansei Gakuin University
2-1 Gakuen, Sanda-shi, Hyogo 669-1337, Japan
[e-mail]

Abstract. Natural Disaster Youth Summit (NDYS) is an intercultural collabora-
tion project promoted by a NPO called JEARN (Japan Education And Resource
Network). They are working on collaborative learning about disaster prevention
by exchanging disaster safety maps created by students over the world and by
discussing over BBS's and video conference systems on the Internet. Language
barrier is the most difficult issue in this activity, and in order to communicate
freely in their own native language, linguistic support, such as using machine
translation systems, is necessary. We develop CoSMOS, an intercultural collab-
oration support system using disaster safety map and machine translation, and
discuss collaboration supports using CoSMOS from four viewpoints; handling
high-definition digital images, linking disaster safety maps to the world map,
supporting collaborative learning, and supporting multiple languages.

Keywords: Intercultural collaboration, Machine translation.

1 Introduction

Collaboration is an interactive process where two or more people work together to
achieve a common goal. The development and proliferation of the Internet technology
enable us to communicate with people in distant places and have potential to facilitate
intercultural collaboration where people in different culture and language collaborate
with each other [1].
Natural Disaster Youth Summit (NDYS) 1 is an intercultural collaboration project run
by JEARN(Japan Education And Resource Network). JEARN is the Japanese branch
of iEARN which is the largest non-profit global education network in the world. The
NDYS project tries to establish an education network where students and their teachers
over the world can collaborate with each other to learn disaster prevention by creating
and exchanging disaster safety maps on which dangerous places and shelters around
school are located [2].
The project so far utilizes conventional BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) and video
conference systems to support the collaboration work over the Internet. These tools can
facilitate communication among them in distant places, but the difference of language
is a most formidable obstacle to hinder intimate collaboration among them in different

1

http://ndys.jearn.jp/ja/index.html