I have been meaning to write a post on the new Arabic-English translation/discussion service, Meedan, that just launched its public beta version the other day. It’s a service that allows Arabic and English speakers to discuss current events on a bilingual platform that brings in translations of blog postings, news stories, and user comments. A very exciting and ambitious project, that has the potential to become a significant agent for cross-language exchanges.
But how, you ask, can they afford to shell out for all this translation? The key bit is an innovation that lets users and members of their team of translators correct draft translations that are originally done by machine translation. The idea is that with more content and users cycled through the system, the mechanical translation program will learn and improve. So check it out!