Discuss HN: Efforts taken toward global communication

Many of us live in primarily English speaking countries and this is the culture we're most familiar with. Without consciously thinking about it the products and value we create are generally aimed toward our crowd: people we run into every day at the office, on the street, on the English internet.

I think English is becoming less important as we approach a more global web; we want to participate in intimate global interactions, interactions of value. Methods of communicating beyond dictionary meanings, like with emotion and connotation, are key to a global humanity. We all know what a smiley is, and we all know what words like "positive" feel like. Combine that with Google Translate (which is pretty good for explicit translation) -- and then we have a usable global web.

What are some cool projects tackling these problems?