Volunteers Sought for Real-Time Web Translator

"Worldwide Lexicon prepares peer-to-peer network of online dictionaries, people to promote on-the-fly translation.

Imagine being able to communicate via instant messaging with people who don't speak your language, or translate a foreign-language news bulletin automatically when you open it in your browser.

These are just two of the applications envisioned by promoters of the Worldwide Lexicon, an all-volunteer project founded by Brian McConnell. His concept: a distributed computing architecture drawing on nodes of participating PCs--and people--around the globe. At its heart is a simple protocol that links Web-based dictionaries, encyclopedias, and translation servers. It can even query human translators via a Gnutella-like peer-to-peer network.

'The Internet has eliminated physical boundaries, but there are still language boundaries,' McConnell says, describing the project at the recent O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference. He proposes the Worldwide Lexicon as a simple, effective way to provide access to the wealth of language resources on the Web. Potential volunteers can inquire at the site, and the first components are expected to go live this summer. As WWL project leader, even McConnell is a volunteer; he is a cofounder and developer at Trekmail.com, a dictation service that enables customers to send e-mail by telephone....

The last piece of the puzzle is development of applications that let people access WWL servers for language translation in near-real time, according to McConnell and others on the project. By embedding hooks to WWL in instant messaging clients, for example, people could request automatic machine translations of incoming and outgoing messages. They could also request a translation of slang, metaphors, or other words not in the dictionary, by one of the volunteer client translators....

McConnell foresees the WWL will eventually automatically translate news reports and other topical information. Client translators could volunteer to work on small parts of long documents in a translation process called "segmentation." The separate translations are recombined automatically and output in HTML." [PC World]

This would be fantastic if McConnell can pull it off. One of the outcomes of blogging that I'm really looking forward to is reading blogs from ordinary people in other countries. I'm fascinated by the Middle East blogs, and as I've noted before, I think it would have been interesting to read Afghani blogs last year. (I understand all of the barriers to this, but I can still dream, so please don't flame me on this one.)

Here's a good example. I found Panjereh.blogspot.com in my referers starting a few days ago. I have no idea what any of it says, but I'm assuming that it's written in an Arabic language. The script on the page is beautiful, and I would use the WWL in a heartbeat to translate it if I could.