Omni-lingual social networking site

Hi all,

I'm totally new to Drupal so I'm still exploring the various modules to see what's available that'll suit my needs.

I need to quickly set up a social network to connect a bunch of people all around the globe. Basically, I need a mix of Ning and Facebook, with the ability to sort people by the info they've entered (location, industry, etc). The reason those two systems won't work is that I don't want there to be a default language...so I have another idea.

I really want to use a communications system based around the use of symbols or pre-set phrases - for example, if I selected Greeting -> "Good morning!" it could display in the default language of the viewer, having been translated through the system. (Club Penguin has a similar phrase selection thing...in their case, it's to make convos safe for kids, but here it's an issue of spoken language.) Phantasy Star Online used to have exactly the type of thing I have in mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star_Online#Communication_system

Here are the needs the site needs to address:

• global coordination, everyone who signs up is pinpointed on a map and perhaps connected regionally (a la Facebook)

• expertise location, depending on the community needs (sorted by ticking a checkbox, so it could be translatable to the viewer's default language?)

• statistics, who's playing where, what are their skills and expertise

• personal profiles and hanging out with the community at large (again like Facebook, just using a menu of symbols or pre-set words)

The catch with all of this is that I am not a programmer, although I can pull together resources as necessary...so, I really need advice.

What modules would be best for this? I pretty much just want to start out with profiles with "walls" (Facebook style), and maybe a group "wall" or two. But the big thing is the use of Symbol Chat and Word Select.

Any advice y'all can offer is very welcome. Thanks in advance!