A Layered Language Service Architecture for Intercultural Collaboration

The Language Grid is an infrastructure for enabling users to share language resources developed by language specialists and end-user communities. The users employ the resources to support their intercultural/multilingual activities. However, there is a big gap between functions provided by the language resources and those needed by the users. To bridge the gap and satisfy users´ needs, this paper extends the Language Grid by adding four language service layers: system adaptation layer, combination layer, coordination layer, and user adaptation layer. By introducing the four-layers, the Language Grid can coordinate several language resources to create new language services customized to users´ activities, such as back translations, multi-hop translations, and specialized translations.