The free and easy-to-use tools that make publishing a Weblog so simple have led to a explosion in the number of blogs written around the world. To help sort the apparent chaos of the blogosphere, Global Voices has long worked to shine a light on the places and people other media often ignore.

But the cacophony that emerges from the sheer number of languages spoken in the blogosphere still hinders a truly global conversation. Automatic translation tools exist, but their results are usually cumbersome and seldom express the passion bloggers put into their posts.

That's where Global Voices' Lingua project comes in. It was designed to help open lines of communication with non-English speaking bloggers by translating the information Global Voices editors assemble and curate.

Thanks to Lingua's volunteer translators, Global Voices posts can be read in over a dozen languages, including German, Chinese, Farsi and Arabic.

Lingua's director, Leonard Chien, explains how the project got started, how it grows and why translating English posts into other languages is important.