In a post last week about the Open Translation Tools summit in Amsterdam, I mentioned a “book sprint” that was working to put together a book on Open Translation.
Well, they did it. It was released today, and it’s a damned fine piece of work. (I say that independent of the fact that they used my Polyglot Internet essay as the introduction to the book!)

In five days, a team led by the indefatigable Adam Hyde put together the definitive starting point for people who want to learn what Open Translation is, what tools open translation communities use, what models are working for translation communities, and what the unsolved problems are in the field. The book includes case studies of notable translation communities, including Global Voices, Meedan and Wikipedia, as well as extensive lists of tools useful for localization and translation. It’s available, for free, both as a website and a printable PDF, and will both be published as a paper book, and continue to evolve as a project you can register for and contribute to. (It’s licensed under the GPL version 2.)

As with earlier book sprints, the project demonstrates that it’s possible to make a good stab at a guide to a field of work if you’ve got the right people willing to assemble in a room for five days. The first book sprint was instigated by my dear friend Tomas Krag, who got sick of spending all his time on the road in developing nations teaching people about wireless networking. He knew he’d never write a book by himself, so he held a book sprint, based on the idea of a code sprint, at the annual gathering of the developing world wireless community. Participants spent a long, difficult day arguing over the structure of the book, then went to their respective corners to write, edit, repurpose and recycle content from around the web into a comprehensive guide. The model worked well enough that Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals adopted it and has used it as a strategy for building new books around conferences.

I’m off to the Aspen Ideas Festival tomorrow, which looks exciting, celebrity-studded, and worth my careful blogging. But I seriously doubt that a team of smart and crazy people will get a useful book out of it, at least not in five days.

If you want to know what people around the world are thinking and feeling, you need help from a translator. Recent events in Iran are a reminder that the internet and citizen media aren’t enough to give us access to events throughout the world - we need tools and strategies for bridging language gaps as well, or we limit ourselves to only the voices we can understand.

For those of us who think the Internet is a powerful tool for international understanding, language is a challenge we need to confront, a complex set of problems we need to address. I just had the chance to join a small band of people dedicated to solving these problems, joining in the Open Translation Tools summit, held this week in Amsterdam. I came away hopeful, sobered by the size and complexity of the problems, but thrilled that such a smart, creative and global group was willing to take on these challenges.

The internet has been polyglot since early days, but the rise of read/write technologies has brought issues of linguistic diversity to the fore. In our experience with Global Voices, we saw lots of people blogging in English as a second language until there were lots of their fellow speakers online… then we saw lots more bloggers in local languages. Once you’ve got an audience that speaks your language, it makes sense to blog, twitter or otherwise publish in that language. It’s extremely difficult to accurately estimate how many people are blogging in Chinese - figures from companies like Spinn3r or Technorati aren’t counting most of the China-hosted blogging platforms. The number is somewhere between enormous and freaking huge, and people who want to know what what Chinese netizens are thinking better hope we figure out how to clone Roland Soong sometime soon. (Roland and the EastSouthWestNorth blog are so important to English/Chinese dialog that I know of several folks who refer to plans for massive Chinese/English translation as “the distributed Roland Soong problem”.)

Other languages are moving online as a way to ensure their survival in a digital age. The 27,000+ articles in the Lëtzebuergesch wikipedia don’t reflect the size of the language (spoken by roughly 390,000 people in Luxembourg) but the passion of that community to ensure the language exists in the 21st century. While Jay Walker may predict the rise of English as the globe’s second language, I’m predicting that the internet will make it easier to document, share and keep alive the world’s linguistic diversity. (They’re not incompatible ideas, BTW, though I still think Jay’s overstating the trend.)

In other words, every single day, there’s more content online in languages you don’t speak, and you can read a smaller percentage of the internet. It’s not just a matter of learning Chinese, though that would be a great first step. We’re seeing content in Tagalog, in Malagasy, in Hindi, and it’s not clear how we’re going to read, index, search, amplify and understand all of it.

The folks at the Open Translation Tools summit (OTT09) have been working on this problem for a long time. Allen Gunn - “Gunner” to anyone who knows him - characterized the participants as toolbuilders, translators, and publishers. But the common ground is that the people represented at the gathering are pioneers, people who’ve pushed the boundaries to ensure that languages can be present online, and that we can translate between them.

Some of the folks in the crowd, like Javier Solá, can claim credit for bringing whole languages online. (That Solá, a Spaniard, can claim that credit for Khmer is its own wonderful story.) Dwayne Bailey, who’s done excellent work bringing African languages online through his project, translate.org.za, reminded the crowd of the painstaking steps necessary to bring a language online: one or more fonts to represent the character set, a keyboard map to allow text entry, appropriate unicode representations, support for the language within software like OpenOffice, the creation of utilities like spellcheckers. Internationalization is now part of virtually any open source project, but it still tends to be an afterthought, and several groups at the summit were focused on the painstaking work necessary to bring Indian, Central Asian and African languages online for the first time.

Thanks in part to the Global Voices tendency to occupy other people’s conferences - we don’t have an office, so we simply send a dozen people to cool conferences and hold our meetings before or after - publishers were probably the best represented group at the meeting. Many of the projects I most admire were represented, including Meedan, which bridges between Arabic and English speakers via translation, and Yeeyan, which translates English-language content into Chinese. It’s interesting to see the different models emerging around social translation. Meedan translates everything, first with machine translation, and then with volunteer human translators, to make English/Arabic conversation seamless. Yeeyan invites readers to suggest English-language content they think Chinese readers would benefit from reading - Jiamin Zhao, who leads their Beijing team, says this hasn’t been very popular with their users, and that much of the translation happens around large, established projects like the translation of The Guardian. And Global Voices just lets anything go - each language team gets to pick what content they want to translate and what tools they want to use.

Some of the publishers are toolbuilders as well. Ed Zad showed off dotsub’s lovely platform for subtitling and translating online video. While dotsub hosts thousands of subtitled videos, many of us know it better as the toolkit underlying TED’s ambitious open translation project. This model of hosting subtitled and translated videos for third parties is a major part of dotsub’s business model - Ed shows us subtitled videos from the US Army, allowing the Army to meet legal obligations to make all their content available to the hearing impaired, at lower costs as dotsub’s tools are far more efficient than other technologies available.

Meedan offers a beautiful set of tools to allow volunteer translators to turn machine translations into more readable, human translations, and is working closely with Brian McConnell’s WorldWide Lexicon, which focuses on giving publishers a great deal of control over how their site is translated while embracing the model of social translation. I was excited to get a peek at Traduxio, which is focusing on translating cultural texts, like Balzac and Tchekhov and building complex translation memories in the process.

One of the central questions at the meeting was whether toolbuilders were building the right tools for translators to use. A number of projects focused on building open source translation memories. These are tools that keep track of how a translator has rendered a particular word or phrase in the past and prompts her with past translations in a new document. Many professional translators use Trados, though it’s apparently one of these tools that’s industry standard, though not well-loved. (One of the odd quirks of the translation industry, Ed Zad tells us, is that translation clients own the contents of these translation memories, not the translators.) It’s not clear whether social translation projects are really using translation memories. We’ve talked about the subject a great deal within Global Voices, but none of our translation teams is using one… perhaps because they’re not aware of open source ones available, perhaps because few of those open source ones are very good, or perhaps because it’s not how they’re used to working. Ziamin from Yeeyan made the same confession - perhaps because we’re working with volunteers who are translating, rather than translators who are volunteering their time, there’s not much push from within our communities for translation memory tools.

There might be more traction for tools that helped with translation workflow. Professional translators tend to be closely project-managed, and work in teams, with a translator, an editor and a proofreader. Most of the social translation models use less complex systems - an editor usually reviews a translated text in a Global Voices community, for instance, but the system isn’t as formalized. And there seemed to be great demand for tools that matched potential readers of texts with translators, systems that could allow readers to flag a text they wanted to read in another language or show translators potential readership for a particular text. I moderated a session on “demand” which generated a wide range of ideas, from seeking data from Google Translate on what documents were most requested by users to creating Firefox plugins that automatically translated texts and allowed readers to request human-translated versions. My Global Voices comrades were exploring a set of ideas about rewarding translators, with recognition, with karma ratings that might translate into professional translation work, with micropayments for translations - all these ideas require new tools and working methods.

Google wasn’t present at the conference, but was the unspoken presence in almost every session. While there was widespread agreement that Google’s machine translation tools were far from perfect - and sometimes farcically bad - they’ve been getting lots better and some participants wondered whether we should be putting the effort into building new social translation systems if they’re going to obviate all our work in a few years. Personally, I think it’s a bad mistake to stop work because we think Google might be working on the same issues.

The languages where Google is good are ones where we’ve got huge corpora - sets of documents that exist in two or more languages, which have been “aligned” by algorithms so that it’s possible to see how one phrase has been translated into another. A corpus like the Europarl Corpora - which contains millions of aligned sentences in eleven languages, taken from human translations of European parliament proceedings - can make it fairly easy to build these tools… though one wonders if they’re better at translating bureacratic memos than casual conversations. (Another major corpus, the Acquis Communautaire, offers the whole body of EU law in 23 languages. Sounds like a blast to read.) These statistical machine translation methods get stronger as we get more aligned documents available.

But some languages don’t have large corpora available - I don’t know where we’re going to find a large set of English/Malagasy translations, for instance. In these cases, rule-based machine translation might work better - one of our participants, who studies rule-based systems, argues that they’ve proved their utility in translating between closely related languages like Spanish and Catalan. They parse sentences into parts of speech, or into more complex intermediate representations, then translate word by word, restructuring the sentences into grammatically correct forms. Our friend pointed to a study he’d helped conduct which saw these rule-based systems doubling the efficiency of human translators from 3000 words a day to 6000 words, in closely-related languages.

My sense is that the most exciting potential in the near future may be to use social translation to create corpora that could benefit statistical machine translation. That probably means ensuring that Google - admired and feared at gatherings like this one - has a seat at the table in a future discussion.

It’s a long path from the discussions in Amsterdam to a system that allows me to stumble upon a blogpost in Persian and request (and perhaps offer a bounty for) a translation. But those conversations have to start somewhere, and it was a pleasure to have a ringside seat for them in Amsterdam.

One of the projects taking place around the OTT summit is a “book sprint“, a five-day project to write a book that outlines the state of the art in open source translation systems. If that sounds crazy… well, it is, but not as nuts as you think. My friend Tomas Krag pioneered the model a few years back with a brilliant book on wireless networking in the developing world, and it’s been adopted by the fine folks at FLOSS Manuals. I’ll link when the book is available… which should be about three days from now!

You can read notes on each of the sessions on the OTT wiki - it’s a great summary of the discussions that took place.

It’s been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there’s been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days on the phone with reporters, fielding questions about:

- Whether social media is enabling, causing or otherwise driving the protests in Iran
- How Iranian users are managing to access the internet despite widespread filtering
- The ethics (and practice) of distributed denial of service attacks as a form of information warfare
- Whether such online activities are unprecedented

Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I’ll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT’s Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:

- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering - there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about topics other than politics - they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.

Gaurav Mishra rounds up dozens of blog and MSM articles and offers an excellent overview of arguments around these questions (with a strong dose of his own interpretation, much of which I share.) He references Evgeny Morozov, who’s got a thorough denunciation of DDOS as a strategy for protest, correctly pointing out that it mostly functions to make participants feel better about themselves by giving them a way to feel involved with the protests. Unfortunately, unlike positive online gestures of solidarity (retweeting reports from Iran, turning Twitter or Facebook pictures green), this one does little more than piss off sysadmins, helps Iranian authorities make the case that forces outside Iran are “attacking the country” and encourage user-driven censorship as a response to unwanted speech.

So, given the wealth of commentary on the questions above by folks smarter than me, let me weigh in on some of the questions I haven’t heard asked.

Biases and social media - One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports. Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be poorer, more rural, less educated and more likely to speak Farsi than Mousavi’s supporters - a picture of the protests via social media runs the danger of overstating Mousavi support or minimizing Ahmedinejad support. We’ve been trying to counterbalance this a bit at Global Voices - Hamid Tehrani, our Iran editor, did a brief roundup last night of bloggers supporting Ahmedinejad. It’s worth noting that the posts he quotes are all in Farsi: language may well be a barrier that is influencing coverage as well, if voices for reform are easily quoted in English and voices for the status quo are in Farsi.

My friend and colleague David Sasaki reminded GV editors that bloggers had predicted a Rafsanjani victory in 2005, and suffered their “Howard Dean” moment when it became clear that their candidate had little support outside the most liberal bloggers. That’s a very different situation than what’s happening now - the hundreds of thousands of peple in the streets points to profound support for Mousavi - but reminds us that the online voices from Iran, especially the English-speaking ones, probably aren’t representative of mainstream opinion.

An Iran story, not a social media story - Iran is one of the countries American and British media pay closest attention to. The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique. But because there’s such strong media focus on Iran, and such interest in the use of social media for protest, this is a perfect storm for interest in this topic.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

Flock - I’ve written at some length about homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Turns out that reporters flock, too. It’s somewhat amazing to me the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions. I’m glad that people are taking a close look at the phenomenon of social media in the Iranian protests - it’s an important, fascinating and worthwhile topic. But there’s a lot of topics out there, and I wonder whether we benefit from a thousand well-researched stories on this phenomenon rather than a hundred, and nine hundred other stories.

Arika Okrent has a thing for languages. Born in Chicago, she got good enough at Hungarian to teach in Hungary, and learned ASL while getting a masters degree in linguistics at Gallaudet, the world’s leading university for the deaf. Somewhere in the course of a University of Chicago PhD in psycholinguistics, things took a turn for the weird, and she found herself studying languages that don’t get a lot of respect in the linguistics world: invented languages like Esperanto, Lojban and Klingon.

Her fascination with invented languages has led to her recent book, “In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamer Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language”. It’s a damn fine book - I devoured it in two sittings, in the course of a flight to LA and back, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I’m not a lover of languages in the way Okrent is, but I am fascinated by absurdly ambitious projects to make the world better (and not just the ones I’m involved with.) And it’s a fascinating surprise to me how many of these language projects involved someone’s sincere, well-meaning and often insane attempt to make the world a better place.

Okrent provides a listing of 900 invented languages created between roughly 1150 and the present, but her focus is on five languages that demonstrate major chapters in the history of language development. One of these languages is Klingon, created mostly to sound badass in Star Trek movies, but which has features that make it a playground for linguists (complex affixes, including honorifics! Object-verb-subject ordering! Glottal stops!)

The other four were created entirely without irony, to solve problems the language designers saw in society as a whole. John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language was an attempt to build a universal language by building a universal metaphysics - once you figured out where every thing, concept and idea fit in Wilkins’s Aristotelian hierarchy, speaking was a breeze. The appeal of such a language is that words explain their own meanings - “zitαs” obviously means “wolf”, since “zi” signifies beast, “t” indicates an oblong head, “α” signifies a larger size, and the “s” indicates that the large oblong-headed beast isn’t tame. The problem isn’t just that it takes a very long time to learn a language that requires you to require how its author thought - it’s very difficult to think as precisely as a language like this requires. Okrent tries to translate a famous Borges passage into Wilkins’s language and gets tripped up on the phrase “it’s clear”. Does this mean “not obscure”? “Transparent”? The precise answers aren’t especially helpful - language is useful not because it’s precise but because it’s understandable.

This is a lesson language designers can’t seem to get their heads around. Perhaps the saddest story is that of Charles Bliss, who Okrent portrays as a deeply disturbed megalomaniac, who designed an elegant pictoral language, then proceeded to harrass and abuse the only community of people in the world who’d adopted the system, a school for developmentally disabled children in Ontario. The crime of the teachers at the center? They used Bliss’s symbols as a way to allow profoundly disabled children to communicate their needs and feelings as a first step towards teaching the children English - this infuriated Bliss, who saw Blissymbolics as a replacement for illogical natural languages. (An alternative version of his life story is available here, from Grant Stott, a student and friend of Bliss’s.)

Okrent finds thorny, difficult individuals associated with many of the languages she studies, and a theme emerges of languages coming to fruition when they’re adopted by someone other than their creators. Loglan, a language created by James Cook Brown to be entirely value-neutral and therefore allow testing of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, never met with much success, while Lojban, a fork from the original project, sports a 906-entry Wikipedia. Okrent credits the fork to Brown’s tendency to alienate and drive away his supporters and the “success” of Lojban to its ability to accept contributions from a wider community of enthusiasts. (Okrent suspects that no one is fluent enough in Lojban or Loglan to actually be considered a “speaker” - in an attempt to specify the parameters of the language, the Lojban community has published a 600 page grammar of the language. That doesn’t include any vocabulary - it requires 600 pages to sufficiently explain the language’s grammar.)

In that sense, the hero of the book is Esperanto. It may be absurdly utopian - can an “auxilliary language”, designed to be everyone’s second language, really bring about world peace? You can find dozens of reasons to criticize its structure, its origins, its implicit Eurocentricity and sexism. But Okrent celebrates the quirky and wonderful community that supports the language, introducing us to native speakers, parents teaching their children Esperanto as a first language, and wonderful expressions of international solidarity that are hard to express in other languages. She’s clearly caught between the temptation to poke fun at the culture and to jump in uncritically. But the messsage is a strong one: languages need a community, a group of people to speak, expand, care for and love a language. Perhaps the best quote in the whole book comes from an Interlingua speaker she meets at an Esperanto gathering. “I think it is a better language. It’s clearer, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto, but I have no one to speak it with.”

The idea that languages thrive because of love, not logic, made me think of Erin McKean, perhaps the world’s most passionate advocate for the idea that we should talk about love when we talk about language. A lexicographer, McKean has been a tireless advocate of the idea that dictionaries aren’t rulebooks - they’re collections of the words we use, not prescriptions for words we should and shouldn’t use. Her new project, Wordnik, inverts our understanding of a dictionary. It includes a LOT of words - over 1.7 million (the idea that the Global Language Monitor would be crowning Web 2.0 as English’s millionth word probably pisses her off), many of which don’t include definitions. Instead, Wordnik pulls examples from the web, from Twitter, from any texts the system can get its hands on. (Erin told me that an early version of the system was based on a corpus that included a lot of old Star Trek books. For a while, you would look up “photon” and get information about torpedoes, not about physics.) It’s a fascinating way to change how we think about dictionaries - we can figure out how to use words by seeing how they’re used, and we understand what words are in a language by seeing what words people are using.

I think I found Okrent’s book so fascinating because I feel a certain solidarity with some of the mad linguists she describes. At the very least, I share some of the cosmopolitan dreams of many of these authors. I believe that we’re tapping only a tiny fraction of the Internet’s power to let us understand each other and communicate across cultures because we’ve done so little thinking about language. As Chinese rises in importance online - and English and Chinese speakers continue to misunderstand each other on key issues - I find myself hoping that projects like Global Voices Lingua or Yeeyan will manage to cultivate the passionate community that Esperanto has earned over the years.

Omar Bongo is dead. He died while undergoing cancer treatments in a Barcelona hospital. Can’t say I’ll be sorry to see him go. The late leader of Gabon could be proud of the fact that his oil-rich nation was significantly more stable than others in West Africa. But his 41-year rule was a naked kleptocracy, and he ruled in classic “big man” fashion, subverting and paying off all opposition. He was a nepotistic crook… and that’s not my opinion, but the headline in the New Zealand Herald about his death.

The Onion’s brilliant “Our Dumb World” - their farcical atlas - describes Gabon as “President Bongo’s Private Residence”. That’s a bit off - while he certainly ran the country for his personal benefit, his most impressive residences were in France, where Bongo and his family owns 33 properties valued at over $190 million. His taste for French property gave the French arm of Transparency International a brilliant opportunity to seek legal action against him for corruption - alas, the other leaders TI is suing probably won’t ever be brought to justice either.

You’d think that the passing of a man who systematically looted his country for four decades would be the cause for celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon. Several African big men have passed on in the past decade, and the situation hasn’t improved much for their beleaguered subjects. When Togo’s Eyadema Gnassingbe died in 2005, the military installed his son, Faure… who was “elected” soon after. Lansana Conté died in December 2008, and within six hours of the announcement of his death, a military government voided the constitution and took over in a coup d’etat. No one’s predicting a coup in Gabon - the minister of Defense is Ali Ben Bongo, Bongo’s son and almost certain successor. (Reuters has a good set of reactions from Africa experts on Bongo’s death - it’s interesting to see how many reference Guinea and Togo in talking about the transition.)

Even if there were elections in Gabon, it’s hard to believe they’d be competitive. Bongo systematically paid off opposition politicians so succesfully that the running joke was that the best way to become a millionaire in Gabon was to start a political party. The country isn’t even a one-party state - it’s a one-man affair. When Bongo died, officials were so afraid of announcing his death that we saw the Prime Minister insisting Bongo was alive and well hours before AFP and other French media made clear that this was no longer the case. It’s going to take years to develop an independent political culture in Gabon… and that will likely only happen if the younger Bongo doesn’t create a similar government structure to his father’s.

Elia Varela Serra has a good roundup of Francophone bloggers reactions to Bongo’s death, including a quote from commenter Akin on AfricanLoft: “The greatest indictment of his lamentable regime of 42 years is that Gabon does not have hospitals that could treat either himself or his wife. What kind of leadership is one that cannot bring any appreciable benefits to its people whilst the leaders jet off to foreign lands for the slightest sign of discomfort?” While most are excited to see another “crocodile” go, few predict Gabon will be a democracy any time soon. The estimable Elizabeth Dickinson of Foreign Policy Passport notes that stores have been closed in Libreville in anticipation of insecurity and AFP is reporting that the country’s land, sea and air borders have been closed.

A closing note - as Gabon works through the transition away from the rule of Africa’s longest serving dictator, watch France. ELF has an enormous presence in the country, and Bongo worked hard to maintain his relationship with the former colonial power. Whether or not France meddles in Gabonese politics, they will be accused of meddling… and I’d be very surprised to see a leader emerge who wanted to remove France’s continuing military and commercial presence.

The opening panel discussion at BeyondBroadcast is titled “Local Perspectives” and it invites citizen media innovators from around the world to show off their work. Unfortunately for the schedule, the panel includes six terrific speakers, roughly twice as many as could fit in the allotted time.

Myoungjoon Kim of MediaAct in Korea, a community media center, tries to explain the unique features of the Korean media climate. Korea has a level of bandwidth that makes the US look pretty pathetic. Actvist media emerged at the same time as Korea reformed along neoliberal lines. Media was deregulated, and there was a recognition that community media couldn’t just include traditional broadcast media, but needed media education, community radio, and community centers that allowed people to create media. The work his organization does offers more than 200 courses to more tha 5000 members who work to create media in a South Korean context. He tells us that for his work to succeed, he’ll need broad alliances, need for reforms in policy structure and increased infrastructure to teach media.

Lova Rakotomalala, Global Voices correspondent for Madagascar, talks about the relationship between citizen media and the political crisis in his come country. 2009 has been extremely trying for Malagasy - the two cyclones that have left thousands homeless have barely made the news. Instead, the little international attention that focuses on Madagascar has focused on a political crisis - public protests which have led to a military takeover. Not only has there been little reporting on the crisis - media companies have been providing divisive propoganda, not helpful reporting.

This situation has led Malagasy to fear democracy - less than 24% of the popular now express enthusiasm for democratic government. There’s widespread resentment towards the international community for perceived meddling in Malagasy affairs. And it’s clear that Madagascar needs a comprehensive agricultural policy.

Lova was one of the founders of FOKO Madagascar - founded in the wake of TED Africa in Arusha by Harinjaka, a prominent Malagasy blogger, the goal of the project was to help Madagascar become more digitally literate and present, and to send the message that Madagascar is “open for business”. Lova quotes Mike Tyson - “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.” As the crisis spread in Madagascar, Foko began documenting protests in the street, trying to fill the gap in international reporting.

Citizen media in Madagascar includes not just the FOKO bloggers on the ground, but a network of 55 bloggers living in five countries. They use blogs, Flickr, twitter and SMS to communicate, and their perspectives are aggregated on Rising Voices and Global Voices. By working with Ushahidi and Frontline SMS, the project is able to involve a much broader group than just the 160,000 internet users in Madagascar - it reaches 2.2 million mobile phone users. This work has led to international attention, including stories on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. This is great, but there’s still only news coming from Antananarivo in mainstream media, while Foko reports from five different cities.

While the internet reaches very few Malagasy, it’s critical for the diaspora, and for the public perception of Madagascar. The current government wants international recognition and has proven willing to intimidate journalists and bloggers - there’s a desperate need for a structure to protect these reporters. But we’re also seeing evidence that social media helps organize social movements, like the movement to free Razily, which ultimately succeeded in releasing the young man who led Madagascar’s “Tiananmen moment.”

Juana Ponce De Leon of the New York Community Media Alliance talks about finding ways to amplify voices that must be heard. Her organization represents 350 weekly and bimonthly populations, representing 90 communities and 50 languages. The organization began as a set of programs for the New York independent press association, but took on special importance in the wake of 9/11, helping bring voices and stories from the Muslim world into the press during a tense and stressful time.

NYCMA doesn’t focus on original reporting - their work is primarily about translation. “It’s a forum for people who make this media” to bring coverage of communities to a wider audience. While the website doesn’t get overwhelming traffic - about 20,000 visits a week - it’s read heavily by NY city and state government agencies.

Ponce De Leon explains that the economic slump has hit her members hard. Little businesses that support community media are having financial problems, and they’re sometimes unable to support local media. There’s a shift from print to internet, but it’s much slower than in mainstream media. Roughly 39% of the organizations she works with have strong, interactive websites. Some are moving directly to internet radio, which is likely to serve as a hub to facilitate connections for diaspora communities.

In the near future, the main focus is on the 2010 census. New York has at least 150 languages represented in the school system - it’s extremely worrisome that the census is being conducted only in seven languages.

Daudi Were, legendary Kenyan blogger, starts his talk with a story about Kenyan prisons. Every ten years or so, Kenya’s prisons explode in violence. Each time, the minister of home affairs is dispatched to the prison to write a study on what’s going on. Daudi tells us that, decades ago, a prisoner tried to hand the minister a letter - he turned away, not acknowledging it, and the prisoner was later beaten. Fast forward to today, Daudi tells us, when some of the ministers had been in prison in the 1980s. They can ignore what’s going on in the prisons, but video ends up being released and news gets out - newsrooms get mobile phone footage of wardens beating prisoners to death.

Digital tools, he tells us, are bringing people into conversations even when people are reluctant to address the issues at hand. Democracy is government by discussion, and Daudi tells us, it’s based around the idea that the other person has something to say that’s worth listening to. Decisionmaking by discussion is very African - if you marry a woman, you may end up spending a long day negotiating her dowry. You could probably complete the debate in ten minutes, but the discussion takes forever because you’re avoiding conflict. That’s what decisionmaking structures like Indabas are about - we have discussions until we can work through most conflicts.

Blogs today create a new space for discussion. “Blogging is probably the most African thing you can do online today. I’m pretty confident that if my grandmother had the internet, she would have been a blogger.”

It’s not content that’s king, Daudi tells us - it’s content and community. This is one of the strenghts of Global Voices, he argues - bloggers discover that there’s a community that has their back. This is also a strongly African idea - “Ubuntu means ‘You are, therefore I am’”. Identity and existence is a function of community.

The rise of new media in Africa is exciting, but it can be very scary. It’s fun to watch the Kenyan government put exam results online and have servers taken down from the load of proud grandparents in Canada logging online to read them. But when Kibaki declared himself the winner of the 2007 elections and began naming ministers, Daudi tells us, the new ministers’ farms were burning before Kibaki finished reading the statement. Violence can spread as well as opinion, information and news. The lesson, Daudi tells us, is that people want to be relevant and want to be heard - if we can’t find ways to let them speak, they’ll burn things instead.

Antonio Cruz introduces himself as being from the country of the country of Manny Pacquiao. If you don’t know who that is, you’re not a boxing fan, but you’ve got something in common with most of the folks in the USC audience. The Phillippines are an enormous country, the 15th most populous, and it’s a country that’s has a huge diaspora and a population scattered over thousands of islands. It should come as no surprise that the country has embraced the mobile phone, with 70 of 90 million residents owning phones.

TXTPower, the organizatio that Cruz helped to found, helps organize citizens and consumers via mobile phones. Huge demonstrations helped topple the previous government and bring President Gloria Arroyo to power… and a clever ringtone campaign almost toppled her. And major consumer movements are organizing against mobile phone tarrifs and taxes.

TXTPower’s methods are pretty funny. To protest a special SMS tax - which would affect the 2 billion SMS sent in the country per day - TXTPower circulated the Speaker of the House’s personal mobile phone number. The thousands of messages received caught attention from the most important local newspaper. In the wake of a fiscal scandal about vote rigging, an audio clip of the President (allegedly) asking a colleague whether an election had been correctly fixed became a hit political ringtone, and TXTPower’s server was taken down by the interest.

TXTPower turns eight years old this August, and “we’re confident of winning more battles.” One of the co-founders (Mong Palatino, the Southeast Asia editor for Global Voices) was just elected to parliament. And new campaigns focus on the costs of mobile phone service, on training people to learn how to get more out of their phones, and on a political campaign to ensure that Arroyo doesn’t turn into “an eternal leade” - actions on are being coordinated on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other social media.

What do you choose to study when you’re a Dutch media scholar of Chinese descent? You could focus on Chinese internet filtering, a rich, provocative and depressing topic of study. You could study the ways in which Dutch society is wrestling with cultural difference and cultural complexity, with the emergence of nationalist attitudes in the wake of the deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh. As the son of Chinese immigrants to the Netherlands, raised in Amsterdam, Lokman Tsui doesn’t think much of these two choices: “Would you prefer to have your left or right arm chopped off?”

Searching for a topic for his PhD dissertation, Lokman found himself talking to Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American media scholar who’s research has focused on the Wikipedia community. Lih urged Lokman to study something emergent, exciting and positive, helping explain how an unknown system actually worked. And so Lokman found himself studying Global Voices and the people behind it. “Global Voices solved my identity crisis,” he offers.

(Some disclaimers are in order for me to blog Lokman’s talk at the Berkman Center yesterday. I’m one of the co-founders of Global Voices, so I’ve been one of his research subjects. Lokman is also a good friend and a valued colleague - he’s part of a group called “the book club” at Berkman which provides critique and moral support to those of us working on book-length projects, which means he’s reading the book proposal I’m struggling with. He and I are working on a couple of papers together, and he just oranized the China Internet Research Conference where I presented a paper. I’m in no way, shape or form objective about Lokman or his work.)

Lokman sees Global Voices as a community of internationalists committed to curating, amplifying and aggregating conversations that other media ignore. In the process, Global Voices serves as a community for people whose identities are complicated, for bridge figures who’ve got their feet in different communities, like the Netherlands, China and the US.

Much of Lokman’s talk seeks to situate the work Global Voices is doing in a theoretical framework, looking at theories of journalism and what each model values, and examining how Global Voices aligns and differs from these models. He quotes Hannah Arendt, who worries that we may lose a public sphere if people embrace “freedom from politics as a basic freedom”. This withdrawal from the public sphere might not harm individuals, but it harms society as a whole, because “the world lies between people”. How does this world - the one that lies between people - come to know itself? How does the internet help create and realize this in-between space? These are the questions Lokman hopes to address by examining Global Voices as a case study of cross-cultural connections possible in a digital age.

The public spheres described by Habermas around coffee houses and by Benedict Anderson around daily newspapers may be giving way to new, virtual spaces. “The internet challenges us to rethink and reimagine journalism and democracy,” though we’ve not yet done a good job of picking up this challenge. In particular, Lokman worries that we’re doing a disservice to the field by looking at the internet as harming journalism - more interesting questions focus around building journalism for a world of strangers united by the internet. “How do we designing better instituions fit for a cosmopolitan age?”

There’s a great deal of literature that seeks to understand journalism by engaging in ethnographic study of newsrooms. Lokman sees his work following in this tradition, though with Global Voices, the newsroom has been replaced with rowdy annual meetings and lively online discussion groups. When scholars like Herbert Gans analyzed newsrooms in terms of modes of news production, they established that biases in the production of news had a great deal to do with the processes involved. Journalists weren’t seeking to silence certain voices - they overemphasized government sources, for instance, because they helped journalists avoid credibility issues and because these sources learned to carefully package news for consumption by journalists. By studying Global Voices from a newsroom perspective, Lokman hopes to identify some of the value judgements that are at work in the course of our production of news. He argues, though, that these techniques can’t apply too directly, because we can’t measure new systems with standards designed for older systems.

This tension comes up most clearly around the question of whether what Global Voices does is journalism. Lokman notes that my co-founder, Rebecca MacKinnon, is insistent that GV is not a journalistic organization, because we don’t have methods for fact-checking, don’t seek to be objective (though we do seek to be transparent and fair) and because most participants don’t see themselves as journalists. (My take on the question isn’t quite as strident as Rebecca’s. I think GV frequently commits acts of journalism, thugh I think we often provide helpful, non-journalistic content.) Lokman would prefer we not ask the question, because it’s not that interesting.
“It’s like asking me if I’m Chinese or not - I just shrug my shoulders.” Instead, it might be useful to see GV as a complement to journalism, a different way of seeing. (Here he quotes Susan Sontag, who describes photography not as seeing, but as a way of seeing.)

Lokman identifies three schools of thought about journalism, each of which contains - he asserts - a democratic theory and an implicit purpose for journalism. A professional theory of journalism - as advocated by scholars like Walter Lippman - implies a belief in liberal democracy. In this case, the purpose of journalism is to provide information, either to the public or, as Lippman seems to imply, to an elite group of decisionmakers.

Alternative media is based around participatory democratic theory - democracies function best when they represent a broad range of actors. The purpose of this media is representative. We can judge the success or failure of journalism by how well it represents different groups in society, especially marginalized groups. Public media, advocated by scholars like Jay Rosen, is based around the idea of deliberative democracy - democracy functions when we have the space to discuss and argue, seeking common truths. The purpose of journalism, in this model, is to offer a space for conversation.

This model of three types of journalism and their implicit value-spheres gets complicated by technological constraints, which Lokman points out have changed over time. It used to be extremely costly to access multiple voices and incorporate them into journalistic discourse, so we engaged in “representative journalism”, asking professional journalists to represent the perspective of the individuals they interviewed. But the costs of speech and of production have changed dramatically, and we haven’t really figured out what peer-produced journalism might look like. We need to revise how we judge and value journalism, Lokman believes.

He proposes that we move beyond objectivity as a key journalistic valye towards hospitality. Objectivity as a gold standard makes sense when information is your goal. But if what you’re hoping to do is manage an inclusive conversation, perhaps we need different standards - we need to focus on whether spaces are hositable to conversation.

Lokman invokes Iris Young’s idea of a communicative democracy, a space in which groups are able to find meeting grounds for conversation. Habermas is interested in these spaces, but believes they are neutral grounds - everyone’s equally comfortable or uncomfortable at a coffee house, right? Lokman doesn’t buy this - there are always power dynamics between people having conversations. But hospitality allows a good host to level these power imbalances. He cites a conversation with me at my house - I’m obviously more comfortable in my home than he is, and I have the power to invite him into my space or throw him out… but if I’m a good host, I’ll work to level the playing field and allow as equal a conversation as possible.

This suggests a new model for excellence in journalism, Lokman believes - one way of judging journalism is the extent to which it creates a space for conversations to take place. Good spaces include mechanisms for greeting and welcoming participants, acknowledging where they’re coming from and what their differences are. It values storytelling and narrative, often as an alternative to deliberation. This requires solving some difficult challenges, like the problem of inclusion. Lokman argues that Indymedia’s failure is that it’s never figured out how to tolerate the intolerant. At the same time, hospitality doesn’t insist on unrestricted access, ala Wikipedia - the door is open, but that openness is conditional.

Lokman doesn’t believe that hospitality is a form of philanthropy - it’s a right, granted by the fact that we all share a common world. He traces this idea back to Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace”, where Kant argues that one cannot refuse a visitor if this would lead to the visitor’s destruction. This has implications for asylum, immigration and for language, and offers a rather strong condemnation of hostility - he shows a sign hanging in Gino’s, a legendary cheese steak joint in Philadelphia This is America - when ordering ’speak English’”. The irony, of course, is that the restaurant is owned by a long line of Italian immigrants who adapted foods of their home to fit local tastes, and who now insist on a badly punctuated form of American English.

Hospitality is about who you let in and keep out, but it’s also about how you include them. Lokman suggests that we analyze spaces in terms of access, recognition and appropriate response. We want to build spaces that are accessible to a wide range of people, we want to realize that they’re coming from different cultures and interpretive frameworks, and we respond appropriately to these contributions. Global citizens, Lokan believes, understand these rules of hospitality better than most.

How could the idea of hospitality change journalism? Most likely through approaches that complement existing, information-focused approaches. Lokman examines a movie critics site, Rotten Tomatoes. It’s got an objective component - the synopsis of the movie - and a deeply subjective component - the reviews. We don’t ask reviewers to be objective - instead, we realize the value of aggregating and curating these perspectives and bringing them together. Global Voices does something very similar - many stories include a couple of paragraphs, often derived from other news reports, explaining the current political situation in Madagascar, then followed with excerpts from blogs offering different opinions on the situation. The value is in aggregating these different perspectives around a base of objective reporting and providing a hospitable space for these other opinions, including the opinions of commenters and linkers.

Lokman acknowledges that a version of journalism based around hospitality can seem hokey or “new agey”. It’s an aspiration, not a reality, and he recognizes that the world is far from hospitable. It’s easier to be hospitable to friends than to strangers, harder with enemies than with friends. But hospitality recognizes that we “need to subvert power relationships to have conversations.” In turn, this means that hospitality is a duty and an obligation, but that we shouldn’t pretend that we can prevent exclusion from some spaces.

David Weinberger wonders why hospitality used to be such a critical part of our collective culture - the Old Testament is full of stories about hospitality. Why has hospitality slipped away? Is it because we’re experiencing the false intimacy of a globalized world? Lokman suggests that we’re seeing a paradox of choice emerging online - as we’ve got more choices, we often make decisions that isolate and cucoon ourselves. Part of this may come from the biggest way in which we isolate ourselves - we restrict the flow of people across national borders to a much greater extent than we restrict financial or cultural flows. Perhaps we’ve become better at accomodating a person’s CDs or movies, but less good at accomodating the person herself.

Jason Kaufman offers the argument that journalism is best understood in terms of professionalism - in the last century, journalism became a profession, and has reinforced the idea that not anyone can write the news. Lokman argues that we’d do better to see journalism as craft, a practice that can be engaged in by professionals or amateurs.

Dorothy Zinberg worries that Lokman is overfocusing on theory and failing to see the reality of journalism - it’s the practice of hard-drinking guys looking for stories that will sell newspapers. She suggests he look closely at Erik Erikson’s work on childnood and society - what is it in human experience that allows us to identify ourselves by difference? These ideas may be increasingly important in a connected world.

I took advantage of my moderator’s role to offer a closing critique - I think Lokman is vastly too kind to Global Voices and that his analysis needs to look at the ways in which we’ve failed as well as those that have succeeded. We may have created a new way of doing something like journalism, and it may be a particularly hospitable space, but it hasn’t had the influence we’d hoped to have. We’re not making measurable progress in changing the news agenda of large media outlets - we may be introducing a new paradigm, but a framework that evaluates our work needs to be critical rather than just celebratory. All that said, I think it’s incredibly helpful to examine the world of journalism and new media with new tools that recognize that global conversations may follow very different rules than those we’ve seen in the past, and I think Lokman’s analytic frame adds a great deal to these discussions.

See as well.

Leslie Berlin did a great service to proponents of social translation by featuring a range of online translation efforts in her column for today’s New York Times, titled “A Web That Speaks Your Language“. Not only did she give an overview of some of the important players in the space, she focused on reasons why human approaches to translation are important at a time when people around the world are creating online content in their native languages.

I’ve gotten several email and Facebook messages asking for information on social translation and the idea of “the polyglot internet”. Here are a few references from my blog and around the web for those interested in finding out more about the topic.

The phrase “polyglot internet” comes from an essay I wrote late last year as a thought piece for a discussion in Dubai hosted by the World Economic Forum. I was trying to make the case that we were likely to miss the diversity and nuance of the user-generated web unless we found better ways to translate the variety of languages we’re seeing online. To be a pain in the ass, I turned in a version of the essay translated by Global Voices volunteers into a dozen languages - my colleagues at the WEF weren’t able to print it correctly, because it included a couple of character sets they’d never seen before. (Serves me right).

The Times piece mentions Global Voices Lingua, the community translation arm of Global Voices. Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices, offers a history of the project. I’d note that Lingua, like all these social translation projects, involves a technical aspect as well as dedicated translators and project managers - Lingua owes a real debt of gratitude to Boris Anthony, who built the original architecture that allowed a post translated on one word press blog to “signal” the English-language “master” blog, and to Jeremy Clarke, who’s been maintaining, extending and expanding the code.

The article leads off with a screen shot from TED’s Open Translation project, and quotes June Cohen, who’s championed the use of social translation to make TED’s video content available in dozens, and ultimately hundreds, of languages. June talks about the project in an interview with Newsweek. I wrote about the launch of the Open Translation project a couple of days back, arguing that the model TED is using could be used for any high-quality, compelling internet content. It’s worth mentioning that the TED project is built around dotsub.com, a powerful platform to enable subtitling and translation of web video.

Berlin’s tour of social translation also includes Meedan, an ambitious project that uses machine translation, backed by human translation, to enable dialog between English and Arabic speakers. And she mentions efforts by Google and by Wordpress to work with volunteer translators to make software interfaces available in multiple languages.

I’d urge people interested in this topic to look at Pootle, a translation framework developed by Dwayne Bailey, who has dedicated a great deal of time to making open software available in South Africa’s 11 official languages, via translate.org.za. And everyone interested in social translation should be paying close attention to Worldwide Lexicon, an exciting project by Brian McConnell, which invites bilingual and multilingual people to translate texts in sections as small as single sentences or as large as whole articles.

Almost everyone mentioned in this blogpost will be attending the Open Translation Tools Summit hosted by Aspiration in Amsterdam this June. I’ve got high hopes that articles like Berlin’s will get more people interested in participating in these efforts, and that the hard work Allen Gunn at Aspiration and others are doing to bring toolmakers and project leaders together will help build a global movement around the idea of social translation.

My friends at TED have launched an exciting new project today, the TED Open Translation Project. It’s a powerful system to allow the “social translation” of their video content. This tool demonstrates the state of the art in social translation on the web today, and I think there are a lot of lessons in the tool and thinking behind it for anyone who hopes to make the polyglot internet more comprehensible, and for anyone thinking about online cooperation.

I’m aware that most people think of translation as roughly as interesting as developing Linux device drivers - necessary, but far from sexy. My hope is to convince you that translation is one of the keys in helping the internet reach it’s potential and to get you at least a tenth as excited about this new tool and approach as I am.

For the past couple of years, TED has shared an amazing set of videos, talks delivered at the TED conferences in California, the UK, and Tanzania. These talks are some of the most fascinating and thought-provoking video content available on the web - many smart people have discovered TED talks and promptly lost a week or more gorging themselves on intellectual candy.

(A personal top five, for those who’ve not taken a deep dive into the videos that are available. I’m not going to argue that these are the “best” talks given at TED, but they are the ones that have had the most influence on me and my work:

- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian minister of finance, on the debate on trade and aid in Africa, framed in deeply personal terms, as she talks about her family’s struggles during the Biafran war.

- Swedish doctor and scientist Hans Rosling uses statistics and visualization to rethink international development over the course of decades and centuries.

- Majora Carter on the importance of environmental issues to urban communities, and the connection between community development and the green movement.

- Oxford development economist Paul Collier explains his brilliant book, “The Bottom Billion” in eighteen minutes.

- Nigerian author Chris Abani on humanity, cruelty, compassion and storytelling. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a talk swing between humor and brutality as rapidly and powerfully as Chris does in this talk. When he finished giving it live, I left the theatre because I didn’t want to hear anything else that day.)

For the past couple of years, these talks have been available to anyone with a good internet connection and the time to download them… but they’re only helpful to people who speak English, the language the talks were delivered in. TED, and specifically June Cohen, the director of TED Media, recognized that there’s huge international demand for TED’s content around the world - take a look at TedToChina, a fan site that offers summaries of TED talks in Chinese.

Translation is supposed to be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Professional translators routinely charge between $0.20 and $0.40 per word - translating this blogposts into one other language would cost over $500 at market rates. The cost of machine translation has fallen from cheap to free, with powerful systems incorporated into Google and other search engines… but the results are far from perfect, and tend to miss the nuance of complex texts. Very few of us choose to read blogs - even on topics we enjoy and follow - via machine translation because the experience is so awkward.

But maybe translation doesn’t need to be so difficult and expensive. Maybe it’s something that interested, talented people will do for free, if given the right opportunities and incentives. That idea inspired the Global Voices community to launch Lingua, our project to translate Global Voices content into over twenty languages. In 2006, we discovered that Portnoy Zheng, an amazing Taiwanese blogger, was translating Global Voices stories into Chinese, and inviting other translators to help with his efforts.

We were thrilled, and started pointing Chinese-speaking readers to Portnoy’s efforts. Other groups, starting with the Francophones, proposed that volunteer translation of Global Voices content into other languages become an official feature of our community, and beginning in 2007, we’ve integrated volunteer translations into our site - under many of the headlines on the main site, you’ll see “zh”, “fr”, “mg” or another two-letter language code. Click on that code, and you’ll find yourself on a translation of that post.

There’s a growing movement to make “social translation” - translation of online information by users around the world, motivated more by community recognition and appreciation than by money - a mainstream approach to making the web more accessible to all readers. The movement has been led by the open source software community, and projects like Dwayne Bailey’s pootle toolkit, a set of tools that make it easier to localize open-source software. (Dwayne launched translate.org.za, a project that makes key software available in South Africa’s eleven official languages.) Inspiring projects in the space include WorldWide Lexicon, an open platform to allow cooperative translation of any website; Meedan, an online community that uses social translation as well as machine translation to build dialog between Arabic and English speakers, and dotsub, a powerful video subtitling and translation tool that invites anyone to become a subtitler or translator.

Cohen and her team looked closely at the tools and teams building the social translation movement and built a new community that learned from the successes and failures of other projects in the space. TED’s tool is based on dotsub, with some very powerful new features added, and their model for recruiting, recognizing and rewarding translators is inspired in part by some of the work we’ve done at Global Voices. For visitors to the site, this means that you can browse videos by language, selecting one of the 32 talks available with Spanish subtitles, or the sole talk available in Kyrgyz.

Select a talk in one of its translated forms, and you’ll get a subtitled video, a translated title and description of the talk. Featured in this description are the two people responsible for translating the talk, the lead translator and the reviewer - like Global Voices, TED is inviting translators to join the community, pairing new translators with trusted reviewers to evaluate the work and to offer any changes or suggestions. Another link on the page leads to an “interactive transcript” - this allows a viewer to select a point in the talk and fast-forward to see the slides and images that accompany the speaker’s words.

Not only is this a fantastically cool way to navigate these talks, it leads to my favorite undocumented feature of the system, which Cohen calls “the Rosetta Stone”. Pick a transcript of a talk in a language you speak. Then select subtitles in a language you don’t speak. You can watch the talk in three languages - the English of the speaker’s words, the Spanish of the transcript and the Turkish of the subtitles. (I suspect my wife, who speaks English and Hebrew well, and is learning Arabic, will addicted to this feature in the near future.)

(This ability to view the same text in many languages may turn out to be one of the most important aspects of the project in the long run. As TED translates hundreds of talks, they’re creating “parallel corpora”, the raw material for machine translation systems. This might be too small to build really strong Turkish to Vietnamese translation technology, but the idea of pulling corpora from tools like dot.sub is something that machine translation folks should be taking a close look at.)

The system is launching with 375 translations, representing 42 languages. Some extremely popular talks, like Al Gore’s talk on climate change, are available in over twenty languages - others are available just in English and one other language. What’s remarkable to me is how many of the talks were translated by volunteers - 200 of the first 300 translation posted, and June tells me that 450 volunteer translations are in the queue and will launch soon. She calculates that if TED had to pay for those translations, the 650 underway would have cost roughly $500,000. While that sum might be something sponsors, like Nokia, which is the lead sponsor for the translation project, might have been able to cover, June estimates the cost of translating all TED talks into 40 languages at over $13 million dollars. To achieve what TED really wants to accomplish - all talks in 300 languages - is over $100 million. It’s simply not possible to take on a task of that size without trying a social translation approach.

Why are people queueing up to translate TED talks for free? The system June and TED have launched leverages some of the lessons we’ve learned about social translation:

- Translation can be fun, if the content’s enjoyable. There aren’t a lot of people lining up to translate UN internal memos for free (according to some estimates, transcripts of UN meetings can cost as much as $8000 an hour to produce, leading to an organization translation budget of $100 million per year.) But TED talks are fascinating to a wide audience, and some people are excited about investing the time to translate them.

- Choice matters. On Global Voices, we don’t attempt to translate every story into every language - we let translators choose what stories they’re interested in. We don’t get a complete edition of our content, but we wouldn’t have such great participation if we assigned specific stories to translators. My guess is that TED is seeing a similar phenomenon, and that translators will initially gravitate to a small set of highly popular talks, then start translating talks that meet their personal interests over time.

- Translators need recognition. On the TED site, translators are some of the most prominently featured people on the page - click through on the translator or reviewer’s name, and you get a page featuring her photo, her work and recognizing her contributions. On Global Voices, we try to feature authors and translators equally - that model doesn’t make as much sense for TED, where the speakers are often celebrities, but it’s clear that TED is taking the translator’s role very seriously and honoring the contributions.

- Community matters. Our translators have the same sort of internal communications systems that our authors do - they divide up tasks, consult each other for assistance and support, and generally function as a tight community. My guess is that language communities are going to emerge on TED in much the same way, and that the translator/review mechanism is going to be critically important for building support, friendships and communities.

- Not all rewards are (directly) financial. GV rewards its most productive translators with travel funding to help them attend our annual meetings. I wouldn’t be surprised to see TED try something similar if they’re able to secure the funding. And we’ve found that translators use their GV experience as evidence that they are competent professional translators and gain more professional translation work from their association with us - again, I’d expect to see something similar with TED. My guess is that prominent translators in the TED community will also become “go-to” guys and gals for TEDsters who are looking for contacts in Turkey or Poland.

I’m really excited about TED’s project for two reasons. One is that it’s great to see an organization I respect and admire adopting and improving on a strategy we’ve embraced at Global Voices. June and I had coffee in NYC a couple of weeks ago, and when she told me that the translations produced by volunteers were frequently better than those produced by professional translation agencies, I was so happy I gave her a high-five. It makes perfect sense to me - translators motivated by pride, community support and interest might well do a better job than those just collecting a paycheck.

I’m also thrilled because TED operates on a very large stage, and their embrace of social translation sends a message to organizations and projects around the world who are considering whether and how they tackle issues of language. Because translation is historically difficult and expensive, most organizations have simply avoided it, except when absolutely necessary.

The internet is huge, growing, and being built by people who speak hundreds of different languages. There are editions of Wikipedia in over 200 languages, and some scholars estimate that there’s as much user content created in Chinese as there is in English. Unless we find scaleable, inexpensive ways to translate, we’re each going to face an internet that’s grows everyday, where we find less of the content understandable. Until we figure out better solutions to translation, we’re fooling ourselves into believing we’re more cosmopolitan and connected than we actually are.

Social translation isn’t the only solution, and it won’t solve the problem by itself. But it’s a great first step, and TED deserves real congratulations in building this great tool and bringing this strategy to global prominence… and for it’s commitment to the values of connection and bridging that underly their commitment to making this information available around the world.

I’m once again locked onto the #Madagascar tag on Twitter, trying to get a sense for what’s going on in the wake of the March transfer of power/revolution/coup. Unfortunately, that tag has been very busy today, as protests erupt into violence and Malagasy citizens find themselves reporting on gunfire in the streets of the capital, Antananarivo.

For those not up to date… for most of this year, Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana has been under intense pressure from an opposition group led by Antananarivo mayor Andry Rajoelina - that pressure stems in part from accusations of corruption and mismanagement by Ravalomanana. In February, Rajoelina declared himself the new President, but wasn’t able to take power. By mid-March, Ravalomanana had lost support of the army (in part because the army didn’t want to shoot protesters, as they did on the tragic Red Saturday) and was forced to step down, and into exile. Rajoelina can’t actually serve as President due to his youth, but has appointed Monja Roindefo and promised elections within two years. Because the government was installed by the army, most nations aren’t recognizing the change in power, and are terming it a coup. (Wikipedia’s article on the crisis is quite good. An earlier summary from this blog might be helpful as well, particularly for understanding underlying factors.)

Today’s violence is connected to demonstrations in support of the ousted president. The military, now in control of Rajoelina and his allies, has been asked to dispel protesters, who have been building barricades and looting shops and buildings. There are no reports yet listing casualty figures, but multiple reports of gunfire suggest that conflicts have been violent at times.

It’s been disappointing to watch Rajoelina, who criticized Ravalomanana’s control of media, ban public demonstrations and crack down on the media. Reporters Sans Frontiers issued a strongly worded statement today (fr) condemning pressure from the new government on media agencies, designed to keep them from reporting on the protests. The nature of that pressure is uncertain, RSF admits - some journalists say they haven’t been prevented from doing their jobs, while others claim they’ve been intimidated and warned off of certain stories. But other actions, like the shutdown of Mada TV - closely associated with Ravalomanana’s supporters - are less ambiguous. The Malagasy media environment is far from open, which makes it hard to track events on the ground, whether you’re inside or outside Madagascar.

I celebrated the use of Twitter by Malagasy friends to report events on the ground in a blogpost a few weeks back, and got gentle but firm pushback from Paul Currion at humanitarian.info, who noted that most of these posts were Twitter users reposting reporting they’d heard on radio or television. Twitter wasn’t responsible for the reporting, he argued, but was being used as a new channel to disseminate journalism. I suggested that, given the confusion around which faction controlled which radio and television stations during the crisis, reporting on which radio station was saying what might well have constituted a form of journalism. It’s an interesting conversation, and not one that’s easy to settle.

But the situation on the ground is different now than it was two months back. Malagasy bloggers, photographers and twitterers are reporting on gunfire in their neighborhoods, and taking photos of armed military personnel confronting demonstrators. These reports by themselves are pretty disjointed and confusing, but the synthesis being offered by Malagasy bloggers and on the Global Voices site are an important journalistic complement to the reporting being offered by wire services like AP and AFP.

The argument about whether citizen media is or isn’t journalism in this context is much less important than the larger question of how bloggers and journalists could help focus more attention on the conflict in Madagascar. As CARE International points out, Madagascar is simultaneously facing a drought, cyclones and political instability. The country is one of the poorest in the world, and is in need of food aid, a need that’s likely to become more acute as the political situation continues to be unstable.

There’s lots of reasons why media attention is important to a country - trade, investment and international support at moments of crisis. Disasters that get a great deal of attention, like the Boxing Day Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, make it possible for organizations like the Red Cross to raise sufficient money to support those affected. Quiet disasters don’t. And Madagascar’s ongoing instability continues to be too quiet, at least in terms of attracting international attention and aid.