*RESCHEDULED* New media and translation – public lectures by Meedan CEO Ed Bice

Note: This event was originally scheduled to take place in December 2012, but has now been rescheduled for March 2013. As part of his upcoming visit to Cairo to lead the next “House of Translation” series of workshops, Meedan CEO Ed Bice will be giving two public lectures, hosted by the American University in Cairo’s Center for Translation Studies and the National Center for Translation: Social Media Translation: Real-Time Media, Network Culture and the Translator Tuesday, March 12, 2013 7pm AUC Zamalek Dormitory Social Media Translation and Technology Monday, March... 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 →

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 →

How you can help translate #Jan25

If you have a Twitter account, can read and understand a little Arabic, and can write English (or any other language), then you can help translate tweets from and about the anti-government protests taking place in Egypt. Doing this, you can help the people who speak your language gain a better insight into what is going on and the discussion taking place on #Jan25. UPDATE 16/2/2011: You can now curate and translate Libya #Feb17 here: http://www.curated.by/meedan/libya-feb17-protests and #Bahrain #Feb14 here: http://www.curated.by/meedan/bahrain-feb14-protests/ We have 9 easy steps to translating tweets: 1.... 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 →

Social Translation: Benefits and Risks … join #Meedan IRC discussion

From next week we’ll be restarting our weekly meet-up on IRC at 16GMT on Thursday 30 July. The aim is to give you a chance to say what you think Meedan should be doing to broker a cross-language conversation. Each week, we’ll discuss a new topic with a new chairperson running the show. Topics could include our community plans, partner network, networking tools, content creation and more. Feel free to suggest a topic you want to discuss. This week, we’ll be discussing the benefits and risks of social translation –... Read The Rest →

'How do we know what to translate?' Notes from OTT09, Amsterdam

If there’s one thing the participants of last week’s Open Translation Tools conference in Amsterdam agree on, it is surely that a polyglot web means a richer, more diverse, more equitable web where access to knowledge and resources is more equally spread. To quote Ethan Zuckerman on the power of the polyglot web: For the the Internet to fulfill its most ambitious promises, we need to recognize translation as one of the core challenges to an open, shared and collectively governed internet. Many of us share a vision of the... 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 →

Meedan Blog