Social Media As the Universal Translator

Two very interesting blogs last week - the first "Bloggers from Non English Speaking Backgrounds – Share Your Tips and Stories Here" addresses the problems faced by bloggers from non-English speaking backgrounds. According to the blog, they have two main issues:

Not knowing which language that they should blog in – should they blog in their own first language and have a smaller potential readership or blog in English where their readership could be larger but where they had challenges in writing as well?

Feeling isolated from other bloggers – a number reflected that at times they felt that they were not taken as seriously by bloggers in other parts of the world and found networking difficult.

Whereas the blog posting itself is short, the 179 comments (as of 13:30 Sunday) are a serious eye-opener into the hegemony of English in the business world. Reading through some of them, I would agree with the first of the two issues - some of the "Englishes" are so painful to read that it might turn potential audiences off.

To which the second blog entry, titled "Can Social Media become a Universal Translator?", albeit interesting, does not provide any tangible solutions. Automated internet based translations give the gist (sometimes) of what is said, but blogging is not about merely saying things. It is about showcasing how smart you are, your expertise, your marketing abilities. So to me, writing poorly in English, or writing in your own language and letting fishes or microbes or any other such animals translate for you into poor English is one and the same thing.

Is there a market for translators here?

I am very tempted to blog in two languages, having parallel translations of what I write in both English and Arabic. The only problem I have is finding the time to do so, coupled with the lack of any statistical data on how many Arabic-speaking readers are into blogging about translation, language and business.

Then there would be the problem of localising, as not everything acceptable in English would be culturally acceptable in Arabic. Localising, of course, could open a can of worms, with some bilingual readers wanting to know why the translations are localised (i.e. slightly different from the original) or - even worse - attempting to do their own translation of the source English. Maybe starting a brand new blog would provide a solution, but then you are losing your optimisation share (the search engines see it as two blogs, instead of a massive and continually updated single one).

I am open to suggestions.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

From 2.0 to 3.0

Dr. Gege Gatt, founder and director of ICON, writes about the six trends that define the new generation of web services:

(1) Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we’re seeing even more intelligent ideas.

(2) Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people’s front doors and people themselves.

(3) Personal organisers: There’s no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives. But however digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business.

(4) Collaboration: Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a ‘Cloud’ computing application at its best. It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. You’ll never be caught short again on a business trip without your slidedeck to hand.

(5) Audio: We love audio-visual on the web, so it’s little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day.

(6) Social media Intermediaries: There’s now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter and Facebook world.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Plurk Twitters in Tongues - for free?

Plurk, a microblogging site, is taking off where Twitter is struggling.

Plurk offers services in 33 different local languages, including Russian, Hindi, Chinese in traditional and simplified character forms, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Japanese; with 45 more getting ready for release. While Twitter is behind in this language support race, they have quickly added Italian, French and Spanish within the last month in response.

While Twitter blames the difficulties of localising in Asian languages, Plurk seems to have solved the same issue with their language strategy: they send out an e-mail with a string of English to volunteer translators to localize the content and send it back. Head translators lead teams of users, and they vote for the best language usage when they run into unusual English slang or a new phrase. Many translators come from the open-source community and are willing to work without pay. Their only reward, aside from Plurk in their own language, is a virtual Rosetta Stone badge they can put on their Plurk user profile.

There is a surprising amount of people who have a strong desire to localize for free a site to have it in their own language. Plurk is not the only such website - Facebook is also dependant on crowd-translation.

Beats me why. Maybe I am a greedy capitalist, or just read in too many languages to bother translating for free, or maybe it is a generational gap. The motto seems to be "If you preach information for free, you need to slave for it". Fair enough!

But it doesn't always work well - one irate user wrote: "This is complete nonsense. It isn't localized in 33 languages or anywhere near it. The only localization I can see is for the word "is" in the two languages I checked - and in one of them (Irish) it's syntactically incorrect as the developers have failed to understand the most basic concepts of internationalization. All BS." :-D

Still some work left for us, professional, paid translators. Hurray!

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.