In response to my post about the Ruby community needing an autotranslator for the key mailing lists, due to the language barrier between English-speaking and Japanese-speaking folks, I received quite a bit of interest, and a few people are looking into automatic solutions, manual solutions, and various solutions in between. But I believe we have a first attempt to meet the challenge.

Jason Toy has set up a mailing list translator site for the Ruby community. It provides autotranslated text of many Ruby mailing lists (both directions, and far more than I expected anyone to tackle), and even better it provides the original text and invites bilingual Rubyists to submit better translations for individual posts.

Jason commented on the previous post, saying his site still needs some work, but it's definitely on the right track. The obvious missing feature is a way to subscribe to the translated lists, either via feeds or mailing lists. Anyone feel like lending a hand can contact Jason at (I think) admin@translator.rubynow.com. Anyone feeling like doing this one better, maybe by setting up an army of human translators to proxy information across the divide, don't let this stop you :)