Worldwide Lexicon = Rosetta Stone

I've been talking with Brian McConnell over at the WorldWideLexicon about integrating the translation functionality of WWL into The Extraordinaries. I finally had time to read through all of the specs this weekend and felt like I was reading the manual to the Rosetta Stone. Truly amazing stuff. Sparks started flying out of my head and new ideas flowed forth (to follow in separate posts).

Premise: with WWL, you can submit documents or URLs which get chunked up into very short phrases. Then, using the API, you can request these phrases in a foreign language (if the phase has already been translated) OR for you to translate into a foreign language, therby contributing to the opus. There is a bunch of other stuff you can do with the system, but I'll leave it simply here:

If operating at scale, WWL could serve as a Rosetta Stone Layer, through which anyone could communicate with anyone in the langauge of their choice (in real time).... or read any written material in the language of their choice.

And this system keeps getting better as more people use it ... while integrating smoothly into IM apps, WebPages, and Apps in general. Just drop in a JS widget and you've got multi-lingual. You've also got a way for readers to make the translations better, wikistyle. This is what makes it different from your average BabelFishs and the like.

The only part that I don't totally grock yet is context. Can you string sentences together that have been translated independetly of one another? Does the combined document make sense?