once more on "mechanical language translation"...

first, read:
>   http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/technology/techspecial4/05lego.html

page 2 of this article talks about amazon's
"mechanical turk", a _fascinating_ service
unveiled recently which is an intermediary
offering human piecemeal employees who
will perform smallish tasks for smallish fees.

these tasks -- which are called "hits", short for
"human intelligence task" -- are administered
via the web and picked up by willing workers;
examples are "identifying objects in a photo"
or answering "is there a human in this photo?"

another example of a "hit" that's used by amazon
is to "pick the one photo out of these three photos
that best illustrates the storefront of this business".

each "hit" that a worker performs receives a payment,
which might range from as little as one-half a cent up
to $.25 or more, depending on the nature of the "hit"...

amazon developed this service for its own purposes,
and then realized that they could make a business by
offering it to other entities that could use it beneficially.
amazon handles all the money transactions, which makes
it possible to get such piecemeal work done _very_ cheaply.

for information on the mechanical turk, read:
>   http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-0655434-6846340?node=15879911

ok, back to the new york times article now, it says this:
>   One new start-up, Casting Words, is taking advantage
>   of the Amazon service, known as Mturk, to offer
>   automated transcription using human transcribers
>   for less than half the cost of typical commercial online services.

reading further, "casting words" has its "mturk" workers
download a digital audio file, then upload a transcript of it,
so there's nothing really "revolutionary" about what they do,
they're just taking advantage of a rather-cheap labor-force.

(my guess is a lot of the people who are accepting "hits"
are homebound, perhaps physically-handicapped people
are stay-at-home moms looking to pick up some income.)

however, there's no real reason that "casting words" couldn't
come up with a more innovative methodology, one that would
create a trio of computerized translations of a specific passage
and then offer them as a "hit" in a "click the best one" fashion...

this combination of computerized translation with human review
might be a very potent means of obtaining high-quality translation
at a relatively cheap price.

and yes, someone could also set up a commercialized version of
distributed proofreaders to get book-digitization done cheaply...

(yes, d.p. does it for "free", but they also get their web-space and
bandwidth donated, so their actual costs aren't readily apparent.
it's also become increasingly clear they won't be able to keep up
with the volume we're getting from the large scanning projects,
so at some point, if we want proofed text for all of those scans,
we're going to have to face the issue of whether we'll pay for it,
or whether we'll decide we don't really want it all _that_ badly.)

-bowerbird