Difference between revisions of "Language Exchange Ideas"

Latest revision as of 11:08, 23 July 2009

Ideas for Global Voices Language Exchange

INTRODUCTION

The Ford Foundation in the United States has agreed to fund Global Voices' development of "the Lingua Exchange", a project to match translation resources to the needs of media partners, for the purpose of facilitating the flow of news across multiple languages, and from local to global news contexts.

Around half of the grant goes to sustaining existing Lingua operations.

The stated goals of the project are to:

1.) Faciliate flows of news and information across multiple languages to support the polyglot Internet

2.) Translate more Global Voices content into key languages, notably those widely spoken in the global south, to improve global awareness and dialogue

3.) Research and develop a translation exchange mechanism to match supply and demand of translated news and information

4.) Pioneer a new mechanism for distributed translation of content and repurposing across a network of different websites

This post on Global Voices describes more of the background of the project proposal, and here is a job description for a new project manager.

Ideas

Please feel free to click the "Edit" link above and add your ideas, questions, suggestions. This project is a work in progress, and we are still only figuring out what should happen.

All ideas welcome! How could we take Lingua to the next level?

Suggestions

• partnership with The Extraordinaries, a mobile application, which enables anyone with a smartphone to contribute to the translation of content.

• partnership with language learning schools and sites like Berlitz, Livemocha, and university language departments.

• partnership with platform-software like Lingotek (experiments underway) to build semi-automatic systems useful for everybody

• Can we add a box for visitors to check if they want their comments be translated and read by original authors? Once they check the box, then the translators would be notified, and then it is easy for the translator to just sent an email to the original author that someone wants to hear your reply...

How we could begin the conversation:

We could identify 3 big questions (and 3 different times) with Lingua editors to kick start the conversation and have some IRC chats (possibly open to the public) where we discuss, get as much input as possible. The IRCs chats could be announced on the wiki, and the chats could be republished there, and we can use the wiki page as a central storage for everything related to the project.

Possible questions for the project to explore:

- Could the Lingua model be expanded to include other websites? Who could benefit, and how could we possibly help?

- What would the ideal translation tool/software look like? What is already out there, and how could we adapt or build on what already exists?

- How could the work of Lingua translators be made easier?

- Where do we imagine Lingua in 2 years?

- What are other collaboration models and options between Lingua and other media?

A preliminary timeline, could look something like this:

• May - IRC Discussions and Conclusions with Lingua community
• June - Appointment of Project Manager
• June 4/5 - New America Media Summit
• June - Research into existing online translation projects and tools published in online spreadsheet/database with help of the community
• End of June - OTT translations summit "where thoughts/ideas of Lingua community presented to global translation community" for feedback
• July - Next timeline for research and development work