A Web 2.0 service idea

August 28, 2006    Meta

One of these days, someone should start a socially-based translation service for blogs.

You see, it’s not uncommon, this being the World Wide Web, to get incoming links from articles written in languages you don’t necessarily speak; for example, my recent post about accessibility got attention from a German-language blog and, sadly, I don’t understand more than a few words of the language (I also got linked up by a French-language blog, but I can get by in French).

So a pretty cool service might work like this:

1. You sign up, and list the languages you can speak with sufficient fluency to translate.
2. You earn “credits” for translating things for other people.
3. You spend your “credits” to get things translated for you by others.

So, for example, I could translate a French blog post for a non-francophone who happened to be mentioned in it, and get a credit that I could use to have someone translate that German post for me.

And, of course, monoglots could have some other way to get into the system; maybe a paid system, maybe something else.

Any takers?