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 the Virtual Professional Communities Symposium 2010

This Wednesday (October 27), Meedan will be talking about the professional implications of the Web 2.0 and social networking at the Virtual Professional Communities Symposium 2010, organized by the Syrian Computer Society in Homs, Syria. Anas Tawileh, Meedan’s VP of Engineering, will be discussing the increasingly visible impact of social networking on the business communities, and will present several practical examples of successful professional social networking platforms. The talk will also explore the relevance and utility of these platforms to the Arab region, as well as providing tips and guidance... 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

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 looking back to 2009, looking ahead to 2010

Thanks for all your brilliant contributions and support to the Meedan project over the last twelve months.  We’ve achieved so much with your help: For 2010, we’ve created a Meedan public calendar: http://bit.ly/8zm4CC We’ll be alerting our community to: - Middle East events - conferences on ICT4D in the Middle East, Arab media, social web, or translation technologies - partner projects - staff or community travels - project releases - weekly IRC meetings Only IRC chats on there right now, but welcome to suggestions.  If you have a calendar tell us... Read The Rest →

Meedan at the Social Arab Web 2.0 in Beirut

The Social Arab Web 2.0 event will be held in Beirut, Lebanon from 7-12 December. A great group of bloggers and new media enthusiasts from all over the Arab world will gather for a week to exchange knowledge, share experiences and learn from each other about the emerging trends in new media and the social web, focusing primarily on relevance to the Arab region and the Arabic language. During the event, I will be talking about how we have been working at Meedan to break the language barrier for access... Read The Rest →

UPDATE: Why Middle East web projects miss their target audience

There’s been plenty of discussion generated about the role of translation in social web projects since we posted on this yesterday. GV blogger and Meedani producer Eman Abd El Rahman – @lastoadri -  is supportive: I totally agree with this post, and actually I was thinking about the same few days ago. You know, we barely have such conferences in the Arab world. Its usually in UK, US.. etc. People in the west have more exposure than we are in here. That’s why when I was in the “Blogging the... 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 →

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