[Translators-l] Der Mundo, multilingual link sharing tool, looking for feedback on wikimedia idea

[Brian McConnell]

Hello,

I am the developer of Der Mundo, a multilingual link sharing tool that enables users to share links to any page in any language. Its part of a larger cross-language content discovery platform. 

Its pretty simple. You give it a URL, it provides a shortcut URL to share. Whenever someone follows that link, the service detects each user's language preference and if translation is needed, auto-translates the page using the best available translation engine (we use several). Try it out at www.dermundo.com

I want to complement the machine translation with an option to wikify the machine translated texts. The process would go something like this.

1) convert the source web page to markdown and strip out superfluous texts as much as possible
2) insert machine translations beneath each source text
3) users can then edit or replace the machine translations from there

In the previous incarnation of the service, we emphasized human translation first, but found that because people were linking to content that aged rapidly, few items would be translated. With this version, we turn it around so that people can intervene if they want to, for example, if an article is a long form essay that deserves close attention. For many situations, machine translation is "good enough" though.

I'd like to talk with someone who's knowledgeable about the wikimedia platform to figure out how best to do this, what the hosting requirements are, and so forth. If you're interested, drop me a line, and if you like the idea behind Der Mundo, spread the word.

Thanks for your time.

Brian McConnell