For translations from non-Latin scripts to English, I've seen people put up PNGs on Mechanical Turk, which seems hard to game--- OCR is usually bad for non-Latin languages, and people who don't know the script usually can't even retype it well enough to put it into Google Translate. Might not work well for alphabets that are easy to learn (Greek, Cyrillic), but if you put up a PNG of Arabic, you probably aren't going to get many non-Arabic-speakers who can do anything with it.

If you're dissatisfied by machine translation, you might consider myGengo - http://mygengo.com - billed as "Mechanical Turk for Translations" - http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/mygengo-is-mechanical-t... (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder).

Many translation services don't qualify their translators, often accepting them after a CV submission. At myGengo we qualify them through tests, and maintain quality control through regular spot-checks. We're based in Tokyo atm, so we're pretty good at Asian ⇄ European language pairs. You can check out an unsolicited 3rd-party review by a translator here: http://drane.it/2010/01/mygengo-fills-a-niche-and-does-what-...

Wouldn't you get the exact same situation with this Second Life scheme?

You may want to try CrowdFlower (disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team), which is a Dolores Labs project that connects users to several different crowdsourcing marketplaces, including Mechanical Turk. We offer a GUI for designing tasks and backend algorithms that automatically reject untrusted work.

I had that experience as well. It's a disaster.