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challenges of the polyglot internet

Ethan Zuckerman has a wonderfully provocative post on how he sees translation as the biggest challenge facing the future of the internet. If the internet is truly to deliver the promise of connecting people worldwide, one of the main barriers, if not the biggest one right now, is that we as people don’t really have the equivalent of TCP/IP for interfacing with each other. For the less geek-oriented, that means we really don’t have a way of having a conversation with each other, with all of us who are connected online (technically, but not linguistically), unless huge innovations in translation will bring about a polyglot internet . English so far is doing the job (poorly) as the lingua franca of the internet.

Ethan warns us that machine translation will never be up to the task completely by itself. It will take a combination of tools and communities to achieve better conversation through translation. Current examples I was thinking of include the Lingua project by Global Voices. Lingua seeks to translate the blog posts by Global Voices from English to many other languages, including but not limited to German, Spanish, Malagasy, Farsi, Bangla, Hindi, Chinese, and some others, creating an infrastructure that allows people who can only read Farsi to know what is happening in the Chinese blogosphere and vice versa. Another project that came to mind is Yeeyan . Yeeyan is a community consisting of people who translate content from around the web into Chinese - people can submit posts they want translated, express which posts you want to see translated, give ratings and comments. Are these models we can extrapolate?Â

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http://www.lokman.org/?p=96

http://www.lokman.org/?p=96