Say Hello To SmartMobs and ILoveTab

Say hello to our first beta testers, Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, Plugs and Cars, and ILoveTab. SmartMobs is serious. ILoveTab is silly. Both deserve a global audience. Help us share them with the world at demo.worldwidelexicon.org.

UPDATE: We are having some problems with edits to Smart Mobs and Plugs and Cars translations not being saved. We’re working on it. Let us know if you encounter problems with other sites. We’ll post an update when this issue is fixed. Meanwhile, please help translate Worldwide Lexicon, I Love Tab and O’Reilly Radar. Thanks!

A History of the WWL Project

The Worldwide Lexicon project has a long history, about ten years. I have been studying language translation technology for many years. It is a difficult problem because computers excel at something things, but are quite dumb at others. I tried many approaches to solving this problem, and have learned much in the process. It has been a long journey, but the lessons from our previous experiments taught us how to build a system that millions of people may use someday.

Volunteer Translators Wanted For A Few Sites

Hello. We’re starting to test WWL on several widely read sites. We’re looking for bilingual volunteers to kickstart the system for a few weeks. The test websites publish one or two short articles per day. If you would like to volunteer, please contact me (brian [[]] mcconnell.net) for instructions.

How To Use WWL With Your Site

Using WWL to translate your website or blog is easy. Here are some suggestions to get the best results for your site.

• Go to thiswillprobablybreak.worldwidelexicon.org, add your site’s RSS feed to the list (Atom feeds do not seem to work yet)
• Add a Translations link that appears at the footer of every article or blog post on your site. Use our logo with the caption “View And Edit Translations”
• Promote WWL to your readers on your site and in email. Encourage them to participate in this experiment. Encourage them to invite bilingual friends to help out.
• If you know how to import RSS feeds, you can read our feeds back into your site. This is a good way to create mirror sites in the most popular languages.

The key to success is to encourage your readers and their friends to contribute to this process. It’s easy and unless you are publishing a novel, it will only take a few minutes.

Thanks for your support. Enjoy the new service.

Worldwide Lexicon Demo Now Available

If you’d like a sneak preview of the Worldwide Lexicon translation service, visit thiswillprobablybreak.worldwidelexicon.org

This is a demo, we’ll be making frequent updates, so it’s not ready for prime time yet. We’ll be adding more features throughout the Spring.

If you would like to test this in your site. Here’s all you need to do:

• Add your RSS feed to the WWL service
• Update your site’s style sheet to include a Translations link that points to your site’s URL on the demo site (our logo is included in this post, you can copy and resize it as needed)
• Encourage your readers to participate in the demo
• Send us feedback, bug reports and suggestions

If you work for a company or organization that would like a custom implementation of this technique, we’d like to hear from you.

(logo to use in Translation links to WWL

Worldwide Lexicon Talk at Ignite Seattle

I’ll be giving a short talk at Ignite Seattle, next Thursday April 5th. If you live in the Seattle area, be sure to stop by and say hello.  More news soon. -Brian

WWL Beta Update

The WWL beta has been delayed a few weeks due to some unforeseen issues with a telecommunications project that has all of us working seven day weeks. WWL is open source, but most of us work in telecom by day and are involved in a large system deployment that has taken several weeks longer than we expected.

We’re pretty close with this, and are currently working on an issue with fetching machine translations to kick start each new text we pick up. We’ll be posting more news here soon, and will be launching the public beta with a few small to mid-size sites with international audiences.

Thanks for your patience.

Hail Mary

The Queen Mary 2 visited San Francisco for the first time this Sunday. I took this photo from Land’s End beach. The ship is so large it cleared the Golden Gate Bridge by only 30 feet. A very impressive sight.

Join Our Online Group

Click here to join our online group at Radio Handi. We’ll be using this group to send newsletters and to host free conference calls about the Worldwide Lexicon project. Thanks for joining!

Brought to you by Elevated Rails

We’re just about to begin beta testing our RSS+wiki translation service. Elevated Rails, a Chicago based Ruby on Rails consultancy developed the RoR version. ER also did most of the web development for Radio Handi, a global conferencing service (and my day job).

If you’re interested in implementing WWL services on your system, email Mike for more information. He can send you the code, or if you want, his firm is available to do custom development and integration projects. They do great work, and I highly recommend them.

If you are a  website or blog publisher and would like to join our beta test, email Mike to get started. Our beta test is by invite only for now. We will open the system for public registration in a few weeks.