Every two weeks, somewhere in the world, a human language becomes extinct. Increasingly people perceive this loss of linguistic diversity as a threat to the diversity of ideas, values, and local knowledge on Earth. They dread a world in which only English, only Mandarin, or only Hindi has survived.
As a contribution to long-term linguistic diversity, the PanLex project works to enable the translation of any word from any language into any other language. To achieve this ambitious goal, we are consulting thousands of dictionaries and other knowledge sources to build an open-source database. It already documents half a billion translations, from which billions more can be derived.
Initial research indicates that PanLex allows users to get more translations into more languages than from other sources, to get better web search results, and to exchange information with speakers of other languages.
PanLex is still under development, but you can already try using it.
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