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 →

Meedan at Translating and the Computer Conference 2010

Meedan will be presenting the emerging trends in social translation at the Association of Information Management (ASLIB) Translating and the Computer Conference 2010 to be held in London, UK from 18-19 November. Join us at 10:30 on Friday 19th as we discuss the latest social translation tools and platforms, and explore the implications of these on translators and their work. We will also discuss future trends and the challenges and opportunities lying ahead. For information about the event’s program, please check the event’s website: http://www.aslib.com/training/conferences/tc_2010_programme.htm Share → Tweet

Meedan at the ProZ Virtual Conference

Join us as we discuss the emerging trends in online translation marketplaces in Anas’ presentation “The Future of Translation: Leveraging Online Translation Marketplaces” at the ProZ Freelance Translator Virtual Conference. The presentation will be available on-demand during the conference, and will discuss the developments in the cross-lingual social web, and the implications of these developments on the translation profession. We will also explore the possibilities and opportunities presented by the social web and professional communities for translators, and provide recommendations for translators to effectively leverage online translation marketplaces. We will... Read The Rest →

Meedan blog goes cross-language

We’ve recently installed the Worldwide Lexicon plugin for WordPress on the Meedan blog, and you should too. It allows readers of other languages to access your content in their own language. In our case, that means Arabic speakers who have Arabic as their default browser language can read our English language posts in translation. WWL automatically offers a Machine Translation, or – where available – a human translation. Any reader can edit the translations on the page and improve them, much as we do on Meedan using the IBM Transbrowser.... Read The Rest →

Meedan at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Think Tank on Global Education

Image via Wikipedia What happens when the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School get together 150 people for 2.5 days to listen to 53 presentations from the folks who are working to reinvent global education in the context of  ’Preparing Children and Youth for an Interdependent World’? The product of this high quality idea churn might take a few years to come down the pike, but the near term result of two days in conversation with this group has me feeling inspired, awed, and…well…educated. I was... Read The Rest →

5 Great Feature Improvements with the New Look Meedan

There’s been a lot of great discussion about Meedan this week since our Monday release which has helped get our message and our product out and about. But for users of Meedan who’ve known the project for some time, what’s different from the beta version? The great news is that we’ve taken account of user experiences to improve this product. What you see is the result of a sustained effort to understand what our users need and how we will encourage uptake of a pretty unusual idea. After all, it’s... Read The Rest →

Meedan's Arabic-English Translation Engine Makes Strides – With Your Help

If you’ve ever contributed a translation to Meedan, you have helped to improve the potential for Arabic and English speakers to communicate and share content online. At Meedan, we hope to encourage communities across the web to contribute their translations towards an open licensed data source of parallel corpora comprising source language and human-generated target language. The value to you as a translator is that can go to any page on Meedan, generate translations and share them out to friends, knowing that your work is not just furthering meedan, but... Read The Rest →

Meedan.net search gets crisp new look

You’re a Middle East enthusiast who wants a broad regional view of Arab world events – how can Meedan.net help? Our new-look search is a great place to start. It will serve you up a list of links and comments on any topic you’re interested in relevant to the Middle East from our community of Arabic and English speakers. How does it work? Imagine you work for a nonprofit that works with women’s groups in the Arab region. You want to keep abreast of developments in the field, and see... 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 →

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