Written on December 19, 2008 – 9:42 am | by Maria Mihale |


A couple of weeks ago my brother asked me if I wanted to help him with a project he had to prepare for one very interesting course called “Economic predictions”. As he wasn’t given a specific subject, he had the total freedom to choose whatever he liked most. And so he did. Globalization; that’s what he decided to write about. Very well, I said, it couldn’t be easier. Everyone knows what globalization is.

And it’s true. This is one very debated subject nowadays, raising controversies that proved themselves to be not only captivating for those involved, but also endless. This is a complex issue, there’s no doubt about it, but when you see the agitation it creates, you ask yourself what in earth is the reason for something like this to happen.

Beyond its global character (as the term suggests), it combines several actions that appear in a variety of domains, including: economy, politics, technology and the socio-cultural environment. The term is often used to refer to a specific type of globalization, the economic one, which consists of the “integration of national economies into the international economy” ( Wikipedia).

If I had this product I am about to describe at my disposal, it would have been one hell of a project. Moka is a company that tries what almost all companies from around the world are, sparing no efforts in order to develop all sorts of new technologies that are able to help people to cross the boundaries between them, whether they’re cultural or linguistic ones.

Based in West Palm Beach, Florida and Beijing, China, Moka released a multilingual chat Service that is meant to work with Skype, called Moka Chat. This is, in fact, a language translation service which helps all of you who are Skype-addicted to chat in languages like Spanish, English and Chinese. The argument the company brought for releasing such a service is that more than 2 billion people identify themselves with these three languages.

This way, whoever uses the Moka Chat (I’m talking about English-natives, of course) can translate their messages to Chinese or Spanish, making a whole lot easier the communication with friends from these two countries. In addition, this multilingual chat service allows users to translate SMS text messages and send them to other people, using an integrated Skype service that is meant for text messaging.

If you’re interested in testing the service, you can use for free during its beta period and download it from Moka’s official website. The main advantage of Moka Chat is that, besides the help it brings as far as the communication is concerned it’s also a very powerful language learning tool.

“Skype is one of the most popular and effective services in the world today for global communications, and we are excited to be adding a high-value multilingual communication capability for Skype users. Moka Chat for Skype is the ideal translation solution for a community with such a vast multilingual user base”, said the President and Cofounder of the company, Diego Winegardner.

(Source: phonearea.net)