"The language barrier is the only remaining barrier on the Net, but in a way, the most significant because comprehending human language is something only people can do. Breaking the language barrier is more about finding a successful organizational structure and economic incentives, than it is about technology."

Does your organization's work serve people who speak a language other than your own? Do you wish there was a way to translate your web site or blog's content so that you could reach a more diverse population?

Worldwide Lexicon is an open source, collaborative translation system for websites and publishers.

in the following e-interview, Brian McConnell, the project's leader, talks about how you can use Worldwide Lexicon with your nonprofit's blog or web site. Brian is an author, inventor and entrepreneur. Prior to WWL, he founded three telecommunications companies. He often writes for O'Reilly Media on topics ranging from programming to science and technology.

How does Worldwide Lexicon work?

The Worldwide Lexicon is a collaborative translation system, similar to Wikipedia, where people can view, create and edit translations. The translations are all created by people, not computers, so the quality can be quite good. The key idea of the system is that websites with a loyal audience often have bilingual readers without knowing it. With WWL they can organize their own users to contribute translations, for free, or for a small fee, or other incentives. WWL is usually integrated into participating sites, so they can promote it to their user communities who, in turn, can contribute translations. WWL is open source, and we are producing a wide variety of tools that can be embedded in virtually any website or web service.

Why is web site and blog translation important?

The Internet is no longer English-only. I know there are people publishing interesting work in other languages, but their work is invisible to me. Translation makes these works visible to people and search engines, and will open up new modes of communication and publishing. There is very little cross-culture communication, especially between countries that have radically different languages or alphabets. What communication there is tends to be mediated by large media companies, and does not allow for the kind of organic publishing and communication we take for granted here. Enabling cross-language publishing on a large scale will have the same kind of effect that the Web did, by creating a new virtual space for people to explore.

The language barrier is the only remaining barrier on the Net, but in a way, the most significant because comprehending human language is something only people can do. Breaking the language barrier is more about finding a successful organizational structure and economic incentives, than it is about technology. The only role technology will play in this transition is to make it easy for people to find or create translated content, and to motivate them to participate long-term.

If a nonprofit wanted to use Worldwide Lexicon to translate their website or blog today, what do they do?

WWL is an open source project. Most of the tools we build are free software. A nonprofit can use WWL in two ways. They can use one of our plug-ins or PHP libraries to embed translation widgets in their websites. They can recruit their own translators to come in and contribute translations for their site. We've designed the system to be easy to implement in a wide range of web publishing environments (our PHP library is especially flexible and easy to work with). If you know what you're doing, you can be up and running in minutes. For people working on more ambitious projects who want to host their own translation servers, they can ask us for the source code for our backend (we will be publishing it as a package in early 2008). This is a more complex task, and requires in-depth web hosting and development experience. We recommend this only for larger organizations that need to host everything in house.

Why should a nonprofit or blogger use Worldwide Lexicon rather than a service like Babel Fish?

Babel Fish is a machine translation tool. Machine translation does not work very well, especially for informal language, which is common in blogs. WWL is people based, so if you have people who are willing to translate your content, you should use WWL to create a translation community around your site. You might be surprised where your readers live. Professional publishers can often justify paying for translators, because publishing in multiple languages automatically makes you visible in new places. WWL will begin to add machine translation services, but these will be for the purpose of obtaining temporary, rough draft translations that human translators can then improve. We don't expect that we will ever use machine translation as a replacement for people, but only as a tool to make human translators more productive. Another important benefit of using WWL is that every translation is a unique webpage that can be indexed by search engines, linked to, etc. This has a big impact on a site's visibility.

How does someone become a translator for Worldwide Lexicon?

Just sign up. It takes 30 seconds.

How do you ensure that translations are accurate?

We are developing a variety of quality assurance systems. The free service is an open wiki, so anyone can post and correct translations. The advantage of a wiki is the ability to correct and annotate pages after they have been published. Of course, this does have drawbacks, so we are working on other techniques, such as randomized peer review, reader feedback and scoring, etc. to collect large amounts of reputation data about contributors. As the user community grows, we will be adding these features to free and commercial services to provide publishers with a wide range of access control and quality assurance options.

Why did you decide to make it open source? What are the pros and cons of making it open source?

I decided to make it open source because we will never be able to build versions of WWL for every publishing and web service platform in existence. By open sourcing most of the system, users can adapt it to whatever they need. We view WWL as a collection of tools, not a destination (although we are building web interfaces to make the project visible to the world).

There are many pros to open source. The biggest is the ability to gain customer trust, because they can try the system out freely, and because they have the option of building their own system if they want to. Most customers have other things to focus on, so they are happy to pay someone to manage it for them. WordPress is a good example of this. Relatively few people host their own WP server, although they easily can.

Open source is also a good way to pre-empt competition from proprietary vendors that lock customers into their solutions. An open source platform built around open standards almost always wins in the long run. Rather than try to build a proprietary product, and then face competition from open source projects, I decided to pre-empt my own future competition and make WWL open source from day one. Of course, open source is also a form of philanthropy, but as a business person I also think ahead about what the competitive landscape is going to look like in a few years. A well designed open source tool can have a lifespan of many years, even decades.

Why did you choose a community driven model? What are the pros and cons of the community driven model?

WWL is a hybrid project. The community model makes the most sense for blogs, nonprofits and affinity groups where the incentive to do translation is not financial. There are many situations where this approach will work well, especially if there is a highly engaged user community. It does not work well for randomly chosen pages. People are most motivated if they have a strong connection with the publisher or community creator.

The commercial model, where publishers pay for freelancers to do translations, makes sense where there is an incentive to reach new audiences, or sell ethnically targeted advertising. For example, a newspaper might want to publish a Spanish edition in parallel with English, and can justify the expense by selling targeted ads on the translated pages. This is not an either or situation. Someone might decide that it's worth paying a few dollars to reward people for fast turnaround on a translation job. So I expect to see many cases where people use a combination of volunteer and paid translators.

What's your favorite Worldwide Lexicon succcess story?

We're still in very early stages with WWL, but already we have logged users from about 130 countries representing over 60 languages. This happened with no mainstream press, and just a few blog posts. It is amazing to see how quickly things can spread now that the entire world has, more or less, equal access to information services. One of our favorite sites is Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. They are using WWL to translate their site to promote a new documentary film produced by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me). The film, What Would Jesus Buy?, is coming out at the end of the month.