Meedan and the concept of collaborative live translation

Posted on Jun 2 2010 by mohammad. Filed under: Community, Education, Internet, Journalism, Social Media, Social translation

Once again, the events surrounding the Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla shows the importance of the web in the flow of news and images between citizens around the world.

Certainly, this is a fresh reminder of the important role of twitter in providing realtime news and regardless of the technical problems, #FreedomFlotilla did trend on Twitter.

In Meedan, we gained an important experience reporting live on developments surrounding this story, adding a new component to traditional reporting: “live translation” – one of our key areas of expertise that hinges on collaborative, and almost realtime translation.

Of course, the challenge of translating in this way is that it crucially rests on teamwork in the community and constantly monitoring the most important sources in both Arabic and English. Meedan community achieved some real success in this, with multiple updates on developments and about 90 links shared across languages including important responses and various press coverage, all this in just two days.

This experience was very special and important at the same time. Creating dialogue and exchanging different points of view between the speakers of both languages from the media of each language is one of the most important tasks of Meedan which we are constantly working to improve in collaboration with our professional translation team.

At the same time, everyone on Meedan can take part in our collaborative translation. To get involved, all you need to do is register on Meedan and watch one of our tutorial videos: