The Lang-8 dilemma
Your president was erected twice
Say what?!
Highlighting the applicability of his language-correcting site in every day written exchanges, founder Yangyang Xi pointed to the above sentence as needing a slight adjustment to convey its intended meaning. So with a quick switch of the letter “r” in erected to “l”, mission accomplished.
Xi is banking on corrections that simple, to those even more complex involving grammatical changes, as the intended end result of users of Lang-8.
Lang-8 is a vertical social networking site that offers a service to its users: the common interest of meeting new people along with helping these new acquaintances improve their language skills (or you can look at it as improving language skills and meeting new people in the process).
You register at the site, select your native language in the drop down menu (on the registration page), then post the entry that you want corrected. A native speaker then interacts with you, correcting your writing on-line. It’s that easy!
Xi points out, it’s not intended to replace full translation services, simply a means for a slight course correction in language skills. Lang-8 now covers the written word, with plans to offer pronunciation help in the future.
With users from 200 countries, representing 80 languages, you’re sure to find someone out there who can help set you linguistically straight, and that’s very, I mean, really gr8!