Duck, Duck, Goose: Can Non_Humans Participate in Community?

There’s an interesting experiment in community just started over at TechNet/MSDN called the Community Machine Translation Pilot.

The first member of the community is the machine translation (MT) service (thanks Microsoft research!).

The MT service (not HAL 9000, I just like the image as a referent to a non_human team member)  takes an article, for example

Hyper-V: Using Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2, runs MT on the text, and then displays it side-by-side with the English language text, like this (English next to Japanese):

Next come volunteers who are bilingual to improve the MT text. You can tell then some text has been “improved” by a human, it’s highlighted like this:

Then comes… you. What do you think of this pilot? Leave feedback.

Others are extending this idea:

• Yair Alan Griver has an intriguing blog post on combining MT with Blogs.
• The Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog is also thinking about combining MT with IM.