New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

The world is full of creative and interesting people.

Some of them will be on stage in the next 24 hours in Long Beach, California, at the annual TED conference:

• The creator of the first African online ad network and the African equivalent of The Huffington Post

• A New Zealand physicist who discovered the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare

• The founder of an international women’s inventor network

• An Indian design researcher dedicated to improving the lives of children

• A Korean-American actress whose one-woman show tells the story of a North Korean spy”

Even though it’s virtually impossible for ordinary people, and even for some CEOs and dignitaries, to score tickets to TED, organizers of the event have worked extra hard to show their commitment to the Open community.  Today, I spotted a list of movie theaters across the United States that would be beaming in a live broadcast of the Ted Prize, for the admission price of $20:

When: Thursday, February 5
Start time: 5pm Pacific / 7pm Central / 8pm Eastern
Tickets: $20
Theaters include:
Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills, CA, 310-274-6869
Laemmle’s Playhouse, Pasadena, CA, 626-844-6500
Michigan Theatre, Jackson, MI, 517-783-0962
Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Bryn Mawr, PA, 610-527-9898
Jane Pickens Theater, Newport, RI, 401-846-5252

There’s also a webcast, which is free.

Of course there are many Twitter users and bloggers at TED, so we’ll get the back story alongside the more polished content on the web and in theaters.

My friend Michael Smolens, founder of the translation and subtitling community dotSUB is there.  Through Michael, I have met a number of remarkable individuals who are committed to shaping their careers around open access, globally, to quality media content that can lower communications barriers and maybe even make the world a better place.

Before last week, I only knew Jesse Dylan as Bob’s son.  Now I have deep respect for his documentary filmmaking and activism around the topic of medical information.  After all,  “Yes We Can” helped get Barack Obama elected.

Rob Hof also uses the art of filmmaking to tell his stories, captured aboard railroad trains in foreign lands ranging from Turkey to Cambodia.  I can’t wait for his Future Express series to debut this spring.

Today, I started looking over the work of Neil Sieling, who shared an amazing story about the cable TV industry grousing to the FCC that it wanted to be freed from having to allocate precious channels for community access.  DirecTV and Dish Networks don’t have a similar public service requirement, the cable guys argued.  The unintended result was that Wayne’s World and local PTA meetings stayed on cable and the satellite TV industry was forced to add public service programming for the first time.  LinkTV was born.

The common thread with these individuals is that they like to share.  They welcome newcomers to their network and don’t throw an NDA in front of you before ordering lunch.  It’s a refreshing way to do business, and to learn.