By Alexey Gavrilov on March 30, 2007

A while ago I posted an article titled Walls and Towers discussing the “language divide” problem of the internet.

It was amazing to learn that there are projects out there, taking seriously on the problem. One of them is 10 years old (!) project of Brian McConnell called Worldwide Lexicon. Its latest incarnation is targeting to provide bloggers and websites with combined automatic / human translation services. The project is open source and public beta is expected soon. It sounds great and I can’t wait to see what will come out.

Another project Kontrib is a recently launched clone of Digg (sic!) with integrated machine translation. It “speaks” English, عربية , Español and Français for now from which I only know English so can’t really test it but some Arabic to English translations look intelligible enough (compared to the original). The site is kinda funny looking too but it’s forgivable if it works.