Translating Hashtags: @Meedan’s Twitter Pilot
Last week, Meedan trialed a new project translating conversations, opinions and links being posted on Twitter. Here are 3 things we learned: 1) Hootsuite provides a powerful tool for team collaboration on social networks For our Twitter pilot, Meedan chose to use Hootsuite as a dashboard for our production and translation team. Hootsuite is an in-browser, feature heavy client which draws together access to a number of social networks. For Twitter, Hootsuite allows users to view various “streams” at any one time – including a user’s home feed, mentions, favourites,... Read The Rest →
Meedan Translates Twitter
A couple of weeks ago here at Meedan we asked ourselves an important question: How can Meedan bridge the conversations taking place right now between Arabic-speaking users and between English-speaking users on Twitter? In our search for a solution, we decided that we should look to the structure of Twitter and to normative user conventions as means to maximise the potential impact of translated Tweets. Here we highlighted a number of avenues to explore: Twitter lists Back in January, Twitter rolled out its new Local Trends feature. Now users could... Read The Rest →
Meedan in Plain English – ميدان بلسان عربي
How does Meedan aim to improve Arab-West understanding? Watch this video by Maya Zankoul to find out: And in Arabic: A BIG thank you to Mohammed S.Kayyali (from Hyperlink Podcast) who recorded the sound & translated the text to Arabic on a very short notice, and to SMEX Beirut for providing a flip cam to do the video recording. Related articles by Zemanta New English/Arabic Translation Site Hopes To Promote Citizen Diplomacy (tech.slashdot.org) Meedan puts machine translation into practice (guardian.co.uk) News translation website Meedan aims to improve Arabic-English relations (guardian.co.uk)... Read The Rest →
Bang bang boom! Bring on the Meedan blog badge
Bloggers! Attention! This is going to be fun. So you’ve got your twitter feed and your friendfeed feed and your delicious feed – and they’re all pointing at your blog. Your blog is a hub for all the comments you’re making and links you’re sharing around the web. Good work. But if you’re interested in what we’re interested in, this will only go so far. That means, if you’re blogging about Middle East news, the regional tech scene, the Arabic language or Arab film and culture – you need to... Read The Rest →
Talk of Meedan: From Sadat in film to a Saudi's sex confessions
It’s been a purposeful week on Meedan.net with new entrants to the community adding their voices to the discussion. Here are some of the topics we’ve been talking about: Fictional dog named after Sadat leads to court case in Egypt Lawyers working for the family of Anwar Sadat have filed a lawsuit against the makers of an American feature film called ‘I Love You Man’ because a character’s dog in the film is named after the former Egyptian president. When the character who owns the dog is asked if he... Read The Rest →
Meedan on YouTube: 5 videos to help you join a cross-language conversation
If you haven’t experienced a cross-language conversation and networking experience before, Meedan.net may throw up some surprises. It’s novel to most users that your comments are translated first by a machine and then by other members of the Meedan translator community. It’s also pretty fun to see your blog or article switch into another language. Unlike many other web services and applications, Meedan.net implicitly combines different roles for a successful experience. Middle East enthusiasts, journalists and bloggers may be drawn more towards posting links and writing comments. Arabic-English translators and... Read The Rest →
Introducing Meedan's Request Translation feature
A little while ago we had this piece of feedback from @Ramblurr on Twitter: @meedan is it possible to flag a comment for translation by a translator? Well now you can. In each Meedan event you can request a translation of a comment. Simply click Request Improved Translation beside a comment and it will be added to a High Priority feed in My Translations so that translators will be able to access it quickly. Here’s a practical example happening right now. إكرامي has left a comment on a Meedan.net event... Read The Rest →
Why Middle East social-web projects miss their target audience
If you’re setting up a shop to sell poodles in Spain, it’d make sense to advertise in the Spanish-language ‘Poodles Monthly’ rather than in the English-language ‘Cats R Us’. That much seems obvious. Yet all-too-often, Middle East-based social-web projects are not using this simple rule of thumb in the work they do: identify your target audience, and communicate with them. Take the Royal Film Commission in Jordan’s recent creativity workshop, which it set up with Joi Ito (an advisor to Meedan we should add) and a bunch of brilliant Creative... Read The Rest →
Social translation in action on meedan.net
It’s so great to see Meedan’s social translation model taking off. Our translations group is closing in on 40 experienced translators who have shared nearly 100 translations. Comment threads on meedan.net are being cross-translated by users using our ‘Help improve this translation‘ Tool and the IBM Transbrowser. We’re also seeing translators on Twitter point each other to Meedan: @meedan I’ll post some translations when I finally get done with class. And now we have our first fully-fledged intern to complement our own professional team of translators from around the Middle... Read The Rest →
Job announcement: Arabic-English Translator for Meedan.net
Position Title: Translator – MENA Region Reports to: Content and Community Manager Location: Middle East Number of Openings: 5 Opportunity Closes: 6 February 2009 Type of Employment: contract Start Date: immediately Term: to 30 June 2009 Work Schedule: part time – minimum 40 hours per month Pay Rate: $300 for minimum hours outlined in contract Payment Terms: via MoneyBookers.com or PayPal, within 10 business days of receipt of monthly detailed invoice, invoice to be received no later than 2 days after the end of the billing month Job Requirements: See... Read The Rest →