Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

I've reported before on the Worldwide Lexicon, the brainchild of my friend Brian McConnell. His most recent breakthrough, which I blogged about in August, was an impressive Firefox plugin that exploits both human and machine translations on the Web to provide pages you can read in your primary language.

As attractive as the Firefox plug-in can be, it's only the first stage in four that Brian plans toward a computing environment that encourages and leverages human translation. On the browser side, the next logical project is to reproduce the Firefox experience for IE users. Ultimately, he hopes the functionality becomes a standard part of every browser. Even better, he's working on a way to include the functionality on the server side so that it's browser-independent (although that technology would require support in the server software, of course).

And there's even more to come. He lays out his vision in an essay boldly titled The End Of The Language Barrier. The bottom of the article points to an equally important statement written for the World Economic Forum by Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Global Voices site that extends the reach of weblogs to people in many countries who previously lacked access to such forums.

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