May be of interest.

cheers, Brianna

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Paul Kastner paul@lingro.com Date: 1 Dec 2007 16:19 Subject: [Icommons] Launching open-dictionary language-learning project (Lingro.com) To: icommons@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 _______________________________________________ Icommons mailing list Icommons@lists.ibiblio.org http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/icommons