By NYU Staff

Want to know what the Italian press is saying about Tiger Woods? Or how the Chinese media is criticizing Bing? Or even just what the Daily Telegraph is saying about citrus sales in English supermarkets?

Read Newstin. Using its patented software, the site has found a way to translate news from more than 160,000 sources across the globe in ten languages.

Newstin, which started with six staff members in Prague in 1998, was initially funded privately by its CEO and founder, Frank Vrabel, and a group of angel investors – affluent individuals who provide capital for business startups.  The site was originally created to solve IT problems for business clients.

But a fairly simple idea has become a service that gives readers a feast of a global range of news.

Most websites—even Facebook— are struggling to crack language barriers, limiting one user’s ability to understand another’s half way across the world. But Newstin insists it has broken new ground on creating a global online community. “We are jumping across these differences to lay a foundation to interconnect all the editions,” said Jeremy Lopez, director of business development of the news site who joined in 2006 to start this global news aggregation project.

Newstin subscribers can search for stories on selected topics retrieving from hundreds of thousands of sources from around the world such as the U.S., the Czech Republic, and China. The website aggregates stories from mainstream media outlets, blogs, and press releases and filters them by relevance or time. What’s better, everything is free.

Newstin also encourages its members to play an active role in the site. Any member can suggest new sources which are subject to review by the Newstin editorial team. The result of this Wikipedia-like approach is a soaring number of aggregated sites. As of today, the site has 160,000 sources from around the globe and it is growing daily.

A Newstin reader can type in a search phrase such as “technology” and the site is able to pull out stories not only contain the key word “technology,” but related articles on IT and various technological breakthroughs.

A search of Tiger Woods within the site first came back with a result of as many as 45,519 stories in English. Then a reader can switch among nine different languages to read what newspapers and blogs around the world talk about the scandal.

“We’ve enabled our readers to get news tailored to their unique needs. It goes beyond keywords search,” said Lopez.

But it is questionable how reliable these sources are. “Every moment, all the data has been piled. But to determine the authority of the sources is one of the most difficult thing,”  says Alan Mutter, an independent media investor.

Newstin seems to have some way to go before becoming a news aggregator that is trustworthy. “Its content stretches too widely that it’s not clear to me whose needs it is serving,” said Mutter. “It needs to be more focused and the sources need to be more trustworthy.”

But media experts say the site still faces challenges. Besides being able to further verify its sources, the other challenge is its translation quality, a universal bottleneck for automated translation services.

The site uses Lingual World, a third party translation service. According to a recent poll, readers are generally happy with the translation, Lopez said. But translations between certain languages are tougher. “It’s much harder to use machines to translate from Chinese into English,” Lopez said. “But you get the gist of the story.”

But Mutter doubts whether readers are getting the accurate gist because even Google’s translation tool is said to be distorting the meanings of the original languages.

Right now, it is in the process of a new round of fund raising, according to Lopez. And it is also in talks with advertising agency Double Click for partnership.  The next big thing for the team of 30 in central Europe is to build an interactive platform for readers to leave comments on the site. Translation to English will also be available to enable readers around the world to read comments in different languages and communicate with each other.