Multilingual Medical Text Development Thatsanee Charoenporn, Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Kergrit Robkop, Prapass Srichaiwattana † , and Hitoshi Isahara †† † Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory, NICT Asia Research Center, Thailand †† National Institute for Communications Technology, Japan {thatsanee, virach, kergrit, prapass}@ tcllab.org and isahara@nict.go.jp Abstract This paper describes the collaborative multilingual corpus development. We introduce KUI (Knowledge Unifying Initiator) to be a corpus tool devel- opment to facilitate the task of medical text translation of participants of dif- ferent mother language. KUI provides a chat function and records the com- munication among participants for the study of the nature of their online communication. The medical text translation is selected as the task for studying the intercultural communi- cation. It contains a list of short ques- tions produced by a doctor in diag- nosing a patient. As a result, the translated multilingual medical text is developed together with a chat log of their communication. The chat log is then analyzed to understand the seg- ments of their communication. 1 Introduction Communities cannot deny the importance of the Internet as the bridge of the world and cannot ignore the crucial role of English language in the cyber society either. There are many attempts in machine translation development among lan- guages to/from English with the aim of paving the way for conquering the language barrier and also exterminating the digital divide. But in fact, language barrier problems do not occur only in the Internet society. Language diversity in each community causes the problem in real life as well. Imagine about more than 250 languages spoken in the US, or about 3,764 languages spoken in Africa and Asia. Even though the language diversity can make life exciting, peo- ple sometimes need help in communicate across languages. When language diversity is raised into discussion, cultural diversity is always a part. Since the language is a dimension of the culture, one cannot deny establishing the under- standing and sharing between different cultures when attempting to bridge the gap. According to this phenomenon, we attempt to create a system for multilingual text development as a method to facilitate the empowerment of language com- munities, although we realize the essential of adopting and implementing measures enhancing equitable multilingualism. The paper is organized in the following way. Section 2 explains the experiment of intercul- tural collaboration, namely ICE. Section 3 de- scribes the nature of intercultural and multilin- gual communication in the scene of doctor - patient dialogue. Section 4 describes KUI as a tool for online collaborative translation. Section 5 explains the experiment and Section 6 analyses the result of the experiment. 2 Intercultural Collaboration Ex- periment As aware in the current language barrier prob- lem and the accomplishment in cross language communication, many research institutes and organizations spend a lot of efforts to overcome the situation. A joint research project of univer- sities, research institutes, and research societies in Asia, named Intercultural Collaboration Ex- periment (ICE) is one among many (Nomura et al., 2003). One objective of ICE is to analyze the inter- active translation refinement procedures im- plemented between humans, and between hu- mans and machines, under the truth that the ad- vancement of technologies increases availability of intercultural collaboration beyond the lan- guage barrier. ICE also supports intercultural and multilingual collaborations using machine translation technologies. In short, ICE studies the computer-mediated cross language commu- nications. By this project, many experiments for multilingual inter-communication have been conducted. One of the experiments is “the experiment for cross-cultural study of expressive avatars survey procedure”, which aims to study whether char- acter representations and facial expressions are