A model based transformation paradigm for cross-language collaborations

Online collaboration is a big challenge in the field of international product development in a cross-language environment. It serves two purposes: cross-language translation and design requirement clarification. Though many approaches and tools are developed for each of the purposes, not a solution serves both of them well. Especially, the traditional statistical methods for cross-language translation cannot preserve the whole semantic information, which intend to incur misunderstanding and ineffective collaboration. This results in potential problems in clarifying the design requirements. In this paper, we proposed a method to online collaboration, named Cross-Language Transformation based on Recursive Object Model (CLT-ROM). The proposed method consists of two steps. Firstly, a natural language sentence is transformed into a source ROM diagram. Secondly, a corresponding target ROM diagram is generated by a transformation algorithm. The proposed method is a model-based communication tool which facilitates collaborations. Since the ROM has been proven effective in requirements clarification, some examples are given to illustrate that the CLT-ROM has a good capability of semantic preserving in requirement engineering for product development.