[FM Discuss] Der Mundo : new crowd translation service for the web, beta this week

[Brian McConnell]

Hi everyone,

Since there has been a lot of discussion about translation here, I
thought I would post this announcement. We're about to rollout a
really interesting crowd translation service. The service works a lot
like Babelfish, you enter a URL and it loads and translates the page
for you, except that Der Mundo is all about community translation. It
is tightly integrated with Facebook, and enables people to view, edit
and curate translated versions of virtually any URL on the web,
anything users find interesting or important. We are working 24x7 to
get this out so people can use it to translate news and reportage out
of the Middle East. We are registering users for the beta as of today,
so please sign up and tell your friends and colleagues. Thanks.

Brian McConnell
Worldwide Lexicon

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Worldwide Lexicon Inc
San Francisco, CA
www.worldwidelexicon.org

Der Mundo (www.dermundo.com) is the worldwide web, translated by
people. Users can go to Der Mundo, enter any public URL, and then
view, edit and share translations for that page with their friends and
colleagues. It works in a similar manner as machine translation tools
like Babelfish (babelfish.yahoo.com) and Google Translate
(www.google.com/translate), except that the real focus is encouraging
people to translate and curate content in the languages they are
fluent in.

The service is tightly integrated with Facebook to encourage people to
bookmark, translate and share whatever they think is interesting or
important, while the translated articles are tagged and curated by
users to make them easy to follow and search. Users can follow
translations from each other, which enables people to form affinity
groups, and to follow people who are translating content they are
interested in.

The service was created by the team behind the Worldwide Lexicon (link
to video interview). They are working 24x7 to release the service so
people can translate and share news and reportage out of the Middle
East. We are currently registering users for the beta, which will
begin this week. We are particularly interested in Arabic and Farsi
speakers who are fluent in other major languages including English,
Spanish, French and Chinese.

The service also includes an option to fund professional translation
for a page, which is powered by the SpeakLike (www.speaklike.com)
professional translation platform. Professional translations are
automatically fed back to Der Mundo, at a cost of a few cents per word
(see the SpeakLike site for rates).

To register for the beta, go to www.dermundo.com, for more information
contact Brian McConnell (brian at dermundo.com)