Putting the World into the Worldwide Web
This blog post is one of series exploring various aspects of the Feb. 15-17 Tech Soup Global Contributors' Summit. Find a subjective report from Daniel Ben-Horin about the Summit here. A tagged, searchable report on all the projects planned coming out of the Summit will be posted with a target date of mid-April.
Summit Topic: Putting the World into the Worldwide Web
Ari Katz of IREX wrote to us: "…what would be worthwhile (and also fully realistic I think) would be putting together a coalition of NGOs that work internationally/with multilingual audiences that would have two main goals: (1) To the extent possible, share knowledge and resources on translation platforms – both crowdsourced and machine. At a minimum, create a common mechanism/community for sharing tools and best practices on dealing with different types of translations. More ambitiously, work together to create a common platform (a Facebook for translation as one participant put it) for nonprofit translation needs so that everyone isn't repeating efforts and reinventing wheels. (2) Create a unified voice in the broader machine translation research and development community, with the aim of working with companies like Google and IBM to help evolving translation tools meet the needs of the international nonprofit field. Part of the idea would be to convey real-life problems and issues we encounter that require different approaches to translation, another part would be to be on the forefront of testing out these tools and providing feedback to the engineers."
Allen Gunn of Aspiration offered some cautionary notes: "I think in the overall narrative of translation, we need to weave more of the ‘access to knowledge' meme into the mandate. That's certainly the frame on it that excites me… I think messaging that focuses on addressing a smaller problem well in a scalable replicable fashion gives you more cover for the inevitable complexity you will encounter along the way… That said, I'm super-excited this is an area that has heat for you all and look forward to seeing where it goes. And happy to be useful in any way we can, as re-animating our own Open Translation Tools program with another global event is on my to-do list for 2011."
One project that ended up on several "I want to work with them…" lists I've seen was the Universal Subtitling Project of Nick Reville's Participatory Culture Foundation. Having just watched Wael Ghonim's incredible post-release interview, which is subtitled thanks to Nicholas' project, I can see the power there.
Obviously, translation is not just about languages. As many people noted at the Summit, "translation" should be parsed as taking what cannot be accessed and making it accessible. This spilled over into the work of Gregg Vanderheiden and Jutta Treviranus on the development of a Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure, or, for those keeping score at home, GPII. There are some fascinating and quite potent players in this space, including Raising The Floor, an international coalition incorporated as a nonprofit in Switzerland, which has developed the GPII plan. And there's Cloud4All, a European project that is carrying out research in support of the GPII concept (As are others).
Terry Stokes from LASA, Peggy Duvette from WiserEarth, Naomi Baer from Kiva, Ed Bice from Meedan.Net, Rob Munro from Stanford, Wendy Hanamura of Link TV, Glenn Fajardo from TechSoup Global, and Jennifer Haroon from Google, were all engaged with this topic at the Summit. I hope some of them — and others — weigh in here with their thoughts.
