May be of interest.
cheers,
Brianna
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Kastner <paul(a)lingro.com>
Date: 1 Dec 2007 16:19
Subject: [Icommons] Launching open-dictionary language-learning
project (Lingro.com)
To: icommons(a)lists.ibiblio.org
Hi all,
We're launching a project to build a compilation of all the available
open-content dictionaries (both same-language and translating /
multilingual dictionaries) as well as develop tools for
language-learners. We're working on expanding the dictionaries through
user contributions (dual-licensed under Creative Commons Attribution
Share-Alike and GNU FDL) and will be submitting updates and
modifications back to the original sources (like Wiktionary). The
project also uses audio pronunciations from the Shtooka project, and
we'll be recording more pronunciations to contribute back to Shtooka.
We're developing innovative tools for people to use with the
dictionaries. The project (named Lingro - http://lingro.com) lets
people read a web page in a foreign language and click on words they
don't know for a translation. Here's an example - it's
CreativeCommons.org for a Spanish speaker learning English. Users can
click on any word in the text for a translation into Spanish:
http://lingro.com/translate/english-spanish/creativecommons.org
There's also a quick search-as-you-type dictionary:
http://lingro.com/dictionary/english-spanish/
Lingro already has tools for people to add / modify single
translations and definitions, and we're working on an interface to
guide people in contributing multiple translations by prompting them
for frequently-occurring words in corpora which don't exist in the
dictionaries. We hope to expand existing open-content dictionaries for
major languages to be at least as good as the copyright-laden
competition and create dictionaries for less popular languages that
are better than anything else out there.
We're set up as a business, but our plan is to make money by providing
the best tools for learning languages. The dictionaries themselves
will always be free and open. We're not even sure if that's the best
business decision. We hope it is. But either way, we're doing it this
way because we think the open content is hugely important. Especially
for content that's so basic to human life and necessary for
communication between different cultures.
Please feel free to let me know what you think of the site. I'd also
love to hear feedback on what we can be doing to help the open-content
community.
Cheers,
Paul
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