CorrectMyText.com is a new social web service from Moscow, Russia. The service is built to help people learn foreign languages with the help of others online.
To participate, users register to the site (those having a Facebook account, though, can just use Facebook Connect to log in instantly) and enter a piece of text in foreign language, for example an essay, a resume, a letter, or a blog post. Other community members, assumably more advanced in the particular language, then provide spelling, grammer, and style corrections to the text. When submitting one’s text it can be specified what the required language skill level of the person providing corrections needs to be. Users can also request to get a recorded spoken version of the corrected text to practice pronunciation. All the tools are built within the website.
The service aims to leverage numerous native speakers who can correct mistakes better (or at least for free) on the web compared to teachers or private tutors. Online it might be also easier to share some controversial or more private texts. It is mentioned also bloggers or webmasters might benefit from the service, though personally I find it slightly hard to believe that many users would be willing to correct commercial websites or blog posts for free. On the other hand, these kinds of services could be sellable add-ons, generating revenue to the active members and the site.
Community features supported allow the members to comment on the texts and corrections, and discuss related topics. The site members can also contact each other directly using the website’s own mailing system. A big drawback at the moment is, however, that there seems to be no rating or reputation system. You can define the level of your language skills yourself, and there is no apparent way of rating another user’s corrections. It definitely would add confidence if you were able to see how trustworthy and skilled the person who corrected your text actually is according to others’ opinion.
Currently CorrectMyText’s community is said to include over 1,500 registered members using English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. Dmitry Lopatin, the Russian entrepreneur behind the service, has plans to grow the community up to 100 languages shortly.
See the press release for further info.
