Fahd from Transwikia at Meedan SF

Anas, Wasma, and I were pleased to have a visit today from Fahd Alhazmi, the founder and coder of the Transwikia project. Fahd is in the Bay Area to prepare for his Masters work in CS after having finished his undergraduate degree at King Fahd University in Saudi. For those of you who do not know about Transwikia – it is a project for enabling crowdsourced translation of Wikipedia articles. (Meedan’s WikiArabi project, which formally ran from 2010-11 but is still online, did not address the challenge of multiple contributors to a... Read The Rest →

New Media and Translation: Cairo House of Translation lectures and workshops postponed

My talks and seminar in Cairo next week have been canceled – all thoughts and prayers to friends in #egypt for peace and progress — ed bice (@edbice) December 6, 2012 We’re sad to announce that the next House of Translation event – in collaboration with the AUC’s Center for Translation Studies and Egypt’s National Center for Translation – has been postponed following recent events in Cairo. We’ll post more information when it’s available, and in the meantime we’ll be translating tweets from #Egypt on our Twitter feed. Tweets by... Read The Rest →

Meedan 2011 Annual Report

We are delighted to present the Meedan annual report for 2011, published today on Issuu. You can view this below, download or share. The report covers Meedan’s partnerships, technology development and programmatic focus through a year of tumultuous change in the Middle East. In presenting this report, we are grateful to the brilliant design work of Meedan Designer Maya Zankoul. We hope you enjoy it. Open publication – Free publishing – More arabic Share → Tweet

Meet Meedan’s 2012 Summer Interns: Flora Cabili and Andrew Ver Steegh

The ever growing Meedan family is excited to welcome the Flora Cabili and Andrew Ver Steegh as interns for the Summer of 2012. Flora, a McGill University student, is researching various development and media indicators in the MENA region, and is currently focusing on Syria to support our collaboration with the Syrian media collective, Al Ayyam. In her own words: For a short time this summer, I am joining the Meedan team as an intern for Anas. I am filled with excitement and curiosity for the work you all do... Read The Rest →

Google Updates Site Translation Plugin Allowing Owners and Readers to Improve Machine Translations

Google announced on Wednesday that a beta update to the site translation plugin, launched in 2009, now allows site owners and readers to “polish up” machine translation of a web page by contributing their own translation. Up til this latest update, the translation plugin only allowed users to view machine translations of a given web page with no ability to publish alternative, read: better, translations. Once a website sets up the plugin, users can choose the language they want to read the site in from over 60 possible languages. Then... Read The Rest →

Red Hat calling @Pilgrim: Bing can’t do it alone

Our English-speaking ears pricked up earlier this morning, as we overheard a strange and troubling conversation taking place between two regulars in one of our favorite haunts: A:”And the idea to pass through us state security and change its name to the national security state security roles ended most bureaucratic de gain important o need protection” B:”De you keep optimistic industry” A:”Roles of bureaucracy, Red Hat is an example of security approval bitalb place before appointment?” B:”Less its Pilgrim … Hat one bikodm mabikodmsh military college and its answer file... Read The Rest →

Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Translating Interfaces vs. Translating People: Closing the Online Language Gap [Guest Post]

This is a guest post by An Xiao Mina, an American design thinker, new media artist, and digital community builder. Her work has been featured in venues internationally, from the Brooklyn Museum to Shanghai’s Xindanwei, and in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian and LA Weekly.  She co-founded Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei in English, a site dedicated to translating the Twitter account of artist Ai Weiwei.  Learn more at www.anxiaostudio.com or follow her on Twitter at @anxiaostudio.   This past month, I arrived in South Korea, sight unseen,... Read The Rest →

Why Facebook’s latest feature release could be the most important yet

Facebook has this week taken an important step towards making the worlds most popular social networking platform a space for cross-cultural communication, by quietly introducing in-line translation. How Facebook translation works This smart new feature is powered by Microsoft Bing machine translation, and allows users to see translations of individual posts on public pages. If, for example, you’re an English speaker looking at Meedan’s Facebook page and you want to see what one of our Arabic posts says, you’ll find a handy “Translate” button sitting in between “Comment” and “Share”.... Read The Rest →

Meedan & QFI release bi-lingual Arabic-English discussion forum at CGI

Meedan has released a new Drupal discussion forum for cross-language conversation, media sharing and networking. The site was developed with Qatar Foundation International (QFI) as a tool for the alumni of its student exchange programs. YALLAH, or Youth Allied to Learn, Lead, and Help, was developed to enable Qatari and American students to build friendships, learn about each others’ culture, and collaborate on community service projects. The site is entirely bi-lingual, using a combination of instant Machine Translation and human editing to produce translations for every post and comment between... Read The Rest →

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