Architecture that interacts with a user, or users of different tongues to enhance speech translation. A recognized concept or situation is sensed and/or converged upon, and disambiguated with mixed-initiative user interaction with a device to provide simplified inferences about user communication goals in working with others who speak another language. Reasoning is applied about communication goals based on the concept or situation at the current focus of attention or the probability distribution over the likely focus of attention, and the user or user's conversational partner is provided with appropriately triaged choices and, images, text and/or speech translations for review or perception. The inferences can also process an utterance or other input from a user as part of the evidence in reasoning about a concept, situation, goals, and/or disambiguating the latter. The system's best understanding of the question, need, or intention at the crux of the communication can be echoed back to the user for confirmation. Context-sensitive focusing of recognition and information gathering components can be provided based on the listening, and can employ words recognized from prior or current user utterances to further focus the inference.