Why Glossia?
Most of the Internet is linguistically inaccessible, and we want to change that. Sadly, languages are often overlooked, and making them front and center in organizations is prohibitive and its impact unmeasurable. Therefore, organizations refrain from embracing the world's language diversity and impose a monolingual culture.
The software revolution
To better understand how we aim to solve the above problem, it's important to understand where we are coming from.
The Internet, the free and open-source software movement, and the continuous approach to software delivery brought unprecedented innovation to the technology industry. It laid the groundwork to make other industries like e-commerce more agile. Some took the opportunity to rethink their problem spaces and solutions. Others, like the localization industry, simply ported existing desktop solutions to browsers, missing a huge opportunity to learn and align with software development movements.
What unfolded was an overwhelmingly unprecedented amount of intricacies and indirection through layers of solutions that made linguistic accessibility itself inaccessible. Ironically, translation solutions required yet more solutions that translated the interactions between them.
Companies delivered software continuously. Localization got in the way of continuous delivery.
NOTE
The legacy enterprise mindset has reduced translators from cultural bridges to mere commodities, stifling innovation in a space dominated by capital rather than the passionate linguists who breathe life into global communication.
The LLM revolution
Like Internet at the time, LLMs present us with a unique new opportunity to rethink the problem and solution domains. They have the following traits that make them uniquely positioned to build a much simpler and faster solution:
- They are trained with languages.
- They are faster than humans.
- They are getting cheaper.
With the right context and tools, we can finally align with continuous delivery, moving from a localization-centric approach to language to one where localization is just one tool among many, empowering humans to evolve from translators into technology partners and language managers. Glossia serves as a language hub centered around three core principles:
- Standardizing and categorizing language knowledge to enhance LLM capabilities
- Providing interfaces and tools for knowledge contribution (including feedback mechanisms)
- Offering interfaces and tools that leverage this knowledge (such as localization tools)
We're designing Glossia to be open, inviting everyone to contribute, and extensible, enabling anyone to build and share their own tools with the community.
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Once we figure out the core of the hub, we'll explore how to measure and experiment with languages, like organizations are doing with other areas such as sales, marketing, content, and design.
An empowered community
Glossia will row against an ocean of incentives and interests that depend on the current complexity persisting. Some might believe we can't succeed without significant capital backing, but we intend to prove them wrong. Communities wield extraordinary power, as projects like Wikipedia have demonstrated. Think of Glossia as a revolution where we partner language experts with LLMs to restore what the industry took from them—the tools to make the Internet truly accessible to all.