Meedan supporting real-time crowdsourced Arabic translation of LeWeb Twitter feed
Meedan is taking part in an exciting crowdsourced Twitter translation project today and tomorrow. We’ll be helping to translate a feed of live tweets from a major internet conference called LeWeb. The results can be viewed here: http://livetweeting.com/ Samer Karam will be reporting on the conference from the ground, with a team of translators translating into Arabic using Twitter’s reply function. It means this prestigious conference which brings together leading technologists from all the big web services (Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Netvibes etc.) will be accessible to Arabic speakers around... Read The Rest →
Translating and the Computer 31: Notes for Meedan's Translation Community
I’m just back from the 31st Translating and the Computer conference in London and have lots of exciting tools and tricks to share with the Meedan translation community. Safe to say, the conference brings together a fantastic array of people including translators, language service providers (LSPs), translation software developers, researchers and government agencies. There was a big showing too from the EU Commission and NATO. Although I was speaking on a crowdsourcing panel that raised some fascinating points of debate (ironic, you say – a panel of experts on crowdsourcing!),... Read The Rest →
Notes from Action Week for Global Information Sharing 09
The idea of bringing together translators with the people who craft and manage web-based translation tools seems on one level obvious. Translators need good software to manage and expand their work; translation software companies need translators to tell them what works and what doesn’t. On another level though, putting translators in a room with the people who are perhaps most responsible for establishing the machine as the first draft translator of choice for the masses (and thereby putting basic translation of texts in reach of billions of web users) is... Read The Rest →
What Google Translate Persian says about the future of the polyglot web
Image via CrunchBase Today was one of the most important days in Meedan‘s history, and for the least expected of reasons. Six days into a electoral crisis of revolutionary proportions in Iran, Google released an alpha version of their Persian MT service. wOOt. Big deal, you may say. An MT service – what has that to do with protests and high politics in the Iranian Islamic Republic. Actually, I think it is enormously significant. It shows that Google feels the time is right for translation on the web. So much... Read The Rest →