While the article initially contends that the statistical machine translation provided by IBM is 84% accurate, it goes on to relate how basic phrases are rendered completely inaccurate. The desire of an Arabic-English town square to foster better communication between cultures is a noble one, as is winning hearts and minds with better understanding and communication. However, positive cultural communication that brings diverse communities together cannot be achieved with the most expensive technologies available.

What's more, the medium of the web and human, electronic communication has been thoroughly proven to generate the worst kinds of human behavior and character flaws, where the civilities prompted by face-to-face discussion are not perceived to be necessary. In other words, speakers of the same language, with relatively similar cultural backgrounds, are found to be unable to communicate positively and effectively behind the safe barriers the web provides. Hopefully, Meadan will recognize the need for true multicultural communication and immersion of its users, rather than simply put up another Web 2.0-type discussion forum.

But the system struggles with slang and other colloquialisms--all the more difficult in Arabic because street talk varies from country to country.

But this is exactly the sort of language that Meadan's online community will use. So the alpha test, which was launched last month, also calls on the services of human translators to correct IBM's machine translations. There is plenty of work to be done. Even a basic English expression like "That's great!" comes out of the machine as the equivalent of "That's big!" in Arabic. It's up to users to point this out and up to designated translators to fix it.