Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

I've reported before on the Worldwide Lexicon, the brainchild of my friend Brian McConnell. His most recent breakthrough, which I blogged about in August, was an impressive Firefox plugin that exploits both human and machine translations on the Web to provide pages you can read in your primary language.

As attractive as the Firefox plug-in can be, it's only the first stage in four that Brian plans toward a computing environment that encourages and leverages human translation. On the browser side, the next logical project is to reproduce the Firefox experience for IE users. Ultimately, he hopes the functionality becomes a standard part of every browser. Even better, he's working on a way to include the functionality on the server side so that it's browser-independent (although that technology would require support in the server software, of course).

And there's even more to come. He lays out his vision in an essay boldly titled The End Of The Language Barrier. The bottom of the article points to an equally important statement written for the World Economic Forum by Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Global Voices site that extends the reach of weblogs to people in many countries who previously lacked access to such forums.

Ethan's essay appealed to me because he describes a culture of helping each other to understand the world by voluntarily contributing translations to important content on the Web. Brian's essay lays out in detail some tools that would make it easy to write and disseminate such translations. Both aspects are important in a world that (to recycle a cliché) is increasingly interconnected, and where ordinary people without large budgets are generating personal testimonies at an enormous rate.

Brian is also requesting donations for Worldwide Lexicon, which is all open source. He says, "We are also looking for corporate donors to fund commissioned projects, such as a Drupal or Wordpress module. One of our main priorities now is to build connectors and interfaces for most of the widely used web servers, CMS platforms, etc. so that adding WWL to a system will become a checkbox option in most cases."

Volunteer translation still faces the problems familiar to the field of translation. The WWL plugin has a rating facility, so as more people use it, high-quality translations will hopefully stand out. And of course, if something of global interest happens in Thailand or Ethiopia, it's unlikely that volunteers can be found to provide translations from those languages to every other language represented on the Web, so we'll have to settle for a certain amount of relaying through a common language such as English.

Even though I'm lucky to have libraries full of information about other cultures available, I'm looking forward to getting more connected.