Workforce Language Services

I really don’t know much if anything about the game/program/way-of-life of Second Life, so this fascinates me. It’s a virtual world created by people - partially based on reality, partially based on fantasy - I think. I’ve recently read stories about companies doing business and marketing through SL, I’ve read about labor unions calling for strikes of businesses through SL and people even setting up virtual meetings in SL. But what struck my interest this morning was reading that people are now using this program for virtual cultural exchanges and foreign travel - complete with real-time virtual translation into the local language. I should probably try this program out. I wonder if when you get into this program there are also virtual workplace miscommunication too. Read more.

“My family and I used to go to Europe during summers when I was growing up,” said Allen, who goes by Flipper Peregrine inside Second Life, and who in the real world (Real Life to Second Lifers) heads a tech company in Pennsylvania. “But here you can just hop from spot to spot and do what you would do in a summer and see the amount of diversity you would see during that time.”

…According to Catherine Smith, director of marketing at Linden Lab, makers of San Francisco-based Second Life, it makes sense that virtual tours would become popular in this world with an average population between 40,000 and 50,000 at any given point in a day.

For Smith, the fact that 70 percent of the audience in Second Life is from other countries makes it a good way to explore new places and learn about different cultures from all over the world. It also provides an opportunity for those who can’t travel to experience what a trip to a certain place would be like using an engrossing three-dimensional platform.

“There’s millions of different reasons why people don’t travel more,” Smith said. “This is not a complete experience but the start of one.”

Smith admits that she likes being able to go to Japan and look at Japanese clothes and get a taste of what that world is like and then teleport home. She doesn’t need a passport and she can even use the free translation program - called Babbler - that does real-time translation in Japanese, as well as Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, German and Spanish, among others.