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
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 →
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 →
Translation Etiquette and Digital Media Credibility
Here at Meedan we’ve been recently discussing what an Arabic-English stylebook for digital journalism would look like. We’ve been inspired by an Arabic stylebook published by the Amman-based Abu Mahjoob Creative Productions and the Washington, D.C.-based International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with the support of USAID’s Jordan Media Strengthening Program. The stylebook was created with the intention of becoming a common reference in Jordan for print, broadcast, photo and digital journalism in the since most media outlets in Jordan lack their own stylebook. In English, we’ve also enjoyed reading... Read The Rest →
10 questions to ask when adding Twitter Streams to your Iran List
If you want to use Twitter to monitor what is going on in Iran today as opposition protesters once again come onto the streets, it’s vital you have tools for knowing who’s worth to listen to. The potential for fake reporters to distribute disinformation is huge. We take this seriously at Meedan. This time around some mainstream outlets appear to be avoiding Twitter as a source altogether. That could mean some hard thinking has gone on inside big media organizations. Reporting false information is as big a no, no as... 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 →