Jeff Jarvis unfortunately buries his lead in a post re Spirit of America fundraising: Both SixApart (typepad) and Blogger have agreed to help put together useable Arabic versions so the circle of Middle East bloggers can be expanded beyond those with English language skills. Tip of the hat and best wishes to them, as well as SoA's own project to produce an Arabic blogging tool.

So let me do the VC thing and ask the "lead the duck" question: Assuming we can foster an Arabic blogging community, how do we stay connected across the language barrier? Yes, there are dedicated folks working at manually translating blog posts and comments at places like Sarmad's Road of a Nation Forums, but it's a grind and slows the action to a crawl.

One part of the answer is to throw cheap cycles at the problem, that is, machine translation. Yes, I'm fully aware of the limitations of the technology, but a cheap something is better than an expensive nothing. And we can all find common ground in making fun of the translation software, at the least.

To that end, I'd like to ask the help of readers to identify best-of-breed technology sources for translation between English and Arabic and Farsi. I'm already aware of Language Weaver and Meaningful Machines on the Arabic to English front. Since much of the development in these areas has been funded (quite openly) by DARPA and In-Q-Tel, there's more available for the path into English than the other way, but we're going to need both, so please send in any tips. The current state-of-the-art has moved to corpus based translation, but an older rule based system would be better than nothing. Right now, this is a technology survey, we'll worry about how to get the systems integration and business deals done later. Have a clue for me? Drop it in the comments.