Worldwide Lexicon Inc

The Worldwide Lexicon is an open source collaborative translation memory that combines professional translators, volunteers and machine translation services to enable people to view, create and curate translations to and from any language. It is an embedded service that can be integrated into any website or web app via a simple web API. We also offer browser based translation tools, such as our Firefox Translator, that make browsing foreign language websites seamless and automatic. Be sure to download our Firefox Translator to get a sense of how our system works to combine professional, volunteer and machine translations to make sites universally accesssible.

Brian McConnell is a veteran entrepreneur with four companies including WWL to his credit. Prior to founding WWL, McConnell founded three telecom related companies, each of which created innovative technologies well ahead of their time. PhoneZone (sold to Hello Direct, NASDAQ:HELO) was one of the first electronic commerce companies, and provided small businesses with an efficient and cost effective way to shop for telecom products and services. Trekmail (sold to VIsto) created a mobile email platform that enabled users to compose and reply to email messages by voice from any mobile phone. Open Communication Systems (failed) created a flat-rate globally accessible conference calling service that was a local call in over 30 countries. 

 

McConnell is also a published author and has written extensively for leading technology publishers including O'Reilly Media, Gigaom, TMC, and others. 

We have two revenue lines. One is to offer professional services to companies (publishers especially) that want to integrate our translation memory into their websites and web apps. The other is a subscription service we are developing for web users where they can sign up to receive professional translations for leading websites and blogs worldwide (initially news focused, but later expanding to cover specific industry domains).

WWL is a collaborative, ad hoc system that leverages workflow similar to that in Wikipedia and other community mediated systems. This workflow, combined with inputs from volunteer translators and automated systems, reduces the unit costs of translation by orders of magnitude. The system is also built entirely around open source and open standards, to enable users to adapt and integrate it with any application they can imagine. Other translation platforms, by comparison, are closed systems sold primarily to large enterprise and government clients, have expensive recurring licenses, and are difficult or impossible to modify in any meaningful way. WWL is regarded as the most advanced and innovative open translation solution in the marketplace today.