Hi everyone,
I am the founder of the Worldwide Lexicon project, a collaborative translation platform. We're beta testing a new multilingual link sharing tool at www.dermundo.com I am writing on two topics. First, I'd like to invite people to test Der Mundo, more info below. Second, I am interested in collaborating on a translation platform derived from the Media Wiki platform.
Der Mundo is a multilingual link sharing service that makes it easy to share links so that anyone can read them. You enter a URL, it gives you a short code which you can share. The system auto-detects each reader's preferred language, and redirects either to the original (no translation needed), or to the best translation service for that language (right now either Google or Microsoft, but we're adding language specific translation engines soon).
What I'd really like to offer is a wiki translation option so people can manually edit or rewrite the translations. We experimented with this in the past, but found that for most pages, machine translation is "good enough" for most people (i.e. its often full of errors, but they can get the gist, so its not worth the effort to rewrite). So what I'd like to do is to figure out a way to auto-translate a page, copy that onto a wiki page, which readers can edit further. I am not familiar with the internals of the Media Wiki platform, but I figured someone on this list might be.
In any case, feel free to try the link sharing tool. It has been localized into 18 languages, and can translate to/from languages supported by the major translation engines (about 60 or so altogether).
If you'd like to discuss or learn more, I can be reached at bsmcconnell@gmail.com
Thanks!
Brian McConnell