It’s been useful to follow the latest volleys in the discussion about the future of the “article” news format. The idea being that the article is dead. As summarized by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine:

I want to suggest abandoning the article for the constantly updated topic page (a la Wave). The problem with an article online is that it has a short half life and gathers few links and little ongoing attention and thus Googlejuice. It’s for this reason that Google’s Marissa Mayer has been advising publishers to move past the article to the topic. Abandoning the article for some living, breathing news beast yet to be defined may be a bit too radical for today’s publishers. So instead, I suggest, at least place the article into a space with broader context – archives, quotes, photos, links, discussion, wikified knowledge about the topic, feeds of updates; make the article a gateway to anything more you’d want on its subjects. Daylife (where I’m a partner) is working on something like that.

His summary reads to me a bit too much like something he’s charging suits at CBS News $400/hour to tell them in a meeting, and the guy’s fixation with Google carries enough of a besotted tone as to seem slightly adolescent. And he’s plugging his own company. In terms of grains of salt. But the topic matters for the language exchange. Grouping information by region, or by language insofar as language serves as a proxy for region, has been the exchange’s likely model so far. Lingua is organized by language teams; so is, arguably, the world.

But grouping translated news by topic, and looking to translate a broader variety of information than just “articles” or “pieces of video” might make more sense. It might also make for better information. It’s a way of focusing multilingual news gathering around the news itself (“everything you need to know about human rights today, gathered by GV across many language barriers”) rather than defining the information by linguistic difference (“Here’s what’s being said in Chinese this week”).

This assumes a very open news exchange environment (that is, this is not the “tip sheet” idea some of you have heard discussed; though not yet on this blog).

It’s all pretty theoretical. It’s much of what we’re sorting information, data, and anecdote to help decide. But the “news sourced by language, ” versus “new grouped by topic, but sourced multilingually” distinction seems increasingly fundamental. If there are more discussions out there worth hearing on this, we’d love to know about them, and to listen.

“Lingua” Survey Says….

Two months ago we (meaning Leonard) conducted a short survey of GV Lingua’s volunteers. We wanted to know how many hours a week the volunteers were dedicating to Lingua translations; how the translation work was distributed on each team; how many people each language had available to help; which translation volunteers were also translating professionally at their day jobs; and who was interested in working with the Language Exchange. Of the 115 translators who plied their trade with Lingua in September, virtually all of them, one hundred and eight, responded to the survey. Here’s the skinny:

Here is a broad breakdown of the languages represented in the survey and the number of posts that came from each region in September:

Participants in the survey / Number of posts (September 09):

Arabic	Bangla	Chinese	Dutch	Filipino
11 / 12	4 / 84	9 / 96	4 / 15	1 / 2
French	German	Hebrew	Indonesian	Italian
20 / 135	3 / 3	1 / 0	5 / 18	3 /42
Japanese	Macedonian	Malagasy	Polish	Portuguese
2 / 4	5 / 28	3 / 48	2 / 17	8 / 17
Russian	Serbian	Spanish	Swahili	Total
2 / 9	2 / 4	19 / 121	4 / 3	108 / 658*

*Excluding 2 posts from the newly-formed Turkish teams; including all RV and Advocacy translated posts.

Of all 108 contributors …

24% are professional translators.

while

76% primarily work in other fields.

Six out of every ten translators who responded, 61%, work on Lingua translations less than five hours a week. Of the other forty percent:

About 21% dedicate 5-10 hours.

A little over 9% reported 10-16 hours

About 5%, said 16-20 hours

And 4% percent said >21 hours. (note to Rezwan: there are some really nice vacation spots in Indonesia. Call me).

We found differences in how the work was distributed from region to region in our sample month, September. Five translators working in Macedonian reported having translated respectively 348, 1, 33 64, and 6 items. That followed pretty well with our assumptions about how much time people were able to spend — different amounts for different people at different times, right? In other cases the distribution was surprisingly even. The likely explanation is that French has more people at its disposal than Macedonian does. But this is a question we’ll be looking at more closely in a round of follow up questions.

A very high percentage, 85%, expressed enthusiasm for working with the Translation Exchange. Of the fifteen percent who were not interested, just under half, seven of the translators, were from the ranks of the editors.

There may be several reasons why editors are less interested in lingua exchange. Leonard’s thoughts:

“1. With their editorial duty and/or other lives, they don’t have more time for extra works.

2. They don’t want to get paid jobs via Lingua or GV, and to maintain voluntary experiences with GV.

3. They are not so sure about what lingua exchange is going to happen.

4. They are not interested in news translation outside of GV.

5. They’ll wait and see what happens before stepping in.

6. Others……

As to follow-up survey, we are thinking about these questions:

1. internet access and bandwidth.  The Exchange may be working with audio-video translation, so we need to know if it is possible for them to view or download this kind of files.

2. working under time pressure.  When breaking news happen, we may need people to do translation under time constraints. We’d like to know if people are comfortable with — and interested in — taking this kind of work.

3. News topics preferences: Clients may have specific interests or demands towrads certain topics, such as arts & culture, economics, politics, sports, etc. We hope to know if translators like or dislike any topics especially.”

Of 16 people who didn’t express interest…

Arabic	Dutch	French	German	Italian
2	4	4	1	1
Japanese	Malagasy	Serbian
1	2	1

Notice:

* All Dutch participants express no interests in joining.

* (Co-)Editors in almost all these teams are not likely to work with the project.

* 7 are translators by trade.

We’ve learned that Lingua’s ranks are not only growing but retaining translators.

Just under half the responding translators began working with Lingua in 2009. Thirty-eight translators have been with Lingua since 2008, and another 15 respondents since 2007. Three of the respondents haven’t done their first translation yet, so we set that number aside for the moment.

That’s the first-glance summary. The next step is to look at what the raw numbers tell us about the potential for — and potential impact of — a Translation Exchange. Among those questions are 1) how work is distributed on each translation team 2) how the Exchange might affect the existing dynamics 3) how to structure teams to avoid any major changes to a system that’s working well, and 4) what sorts of incentives or disincentives are at work now, and what would a Translation Exchange do to that nicely-balanced equation?

Tap, tap, is this thing still on?

Oh yeah, we have a blog:

After a long summer inside libraries and airplanes, the Exchange Project emerges with fistfuls of information; an idea for a framework; some opinions about platforms. With fall here, where do we stand?

– The survey of Lingua’s membership provided some surprising data, which Leonard is breaking down and we’ll summarize in a separate post. Lingua’s largest language communities are in Spanish, French and Arabic. So we’re eye-ing those three languages, plus Chinese (where we know a guy who knows a guy) as the first languages for the exchange.

– Lingua language teams involved in the exchange will likely designate a member to handle exchange work, rather than the existing team leader. The team leaders have enough on their plates. Tasks lingua already does well and the new tasks the exchange would generate are likely different skill sets. Some tri-lingualism might be useful.

– Lingua’s volunteer corps expresses enthusiasm for, and curiosity about, the exchange project. The nature and level of that enthusiasm differs from team to team.

– On markets, we’re seeing regional differences. That’s expected. The exact nature of the differences is becoming clearer. In Francafone Africa, the potential clients are more likely NGO. The Spanish desk looks more likely to be dealing with media clients. Think tanks in the US, EU and, interestingly, East Asia, are interested in content from the middle east. That’s pretty general still. But trends are starting to emerge.

– A team of graduate students in linguistics and language studies at Georgetown, in Washington, DC, has expressed interest in proving some Arabic-language support. Media monitoring comes to mind.

–  In theory, India and Russia are two of the few places on Earth with somewhat viable daily news businesses, online and elsewhere. Or at least viable ad markets. Tod ate there’s less interest in these places for low cost translated content. Something’s up. My first thought would be that they don’t need it, or don’t think they do: that it’s 1997 in your average Delhi newsroom. The question remains: are Indian or Russian media a market for the exchange? Indian think tanks probably are. That’s under investigation.

– Some topics that would be new to GV might make sense for the exchange. Kevin at New American Media would love to see more sports content. Not sports as in who won yesterday’s cricket match at the Oval. Sports as in Jackie Robinson: sports as cultural coverage. The 2010 World Cup comes to mind as a vastly multilingual media event with possibilities for us. Leonard also mentioned knowing a guy who was into sumo, but didn’t give a name. I must confess a certain fascination with Bollywood gossip myself, but I don’t really see us going there.

– On platforms, Berny is leaning WordPress-ish directions and is talking or soon will be talking to Jer.

– We’re surveying Arabic, French and Spanish teams to find out their bandwidth needs. There’s concern about who can handle video — something in which NAM is very interested — and who can’t.

– Pace Solana, a mock-up or sample of the tip sheet idea is in the works.

– NAM liked our translations from our first limited test, but we couldn’t handle several of the languages they needed. Vietnamese, for example. We were able to give them publishable content in a timely fashion in Mandarin and Japanese.

– The project mascot, Paio the Catalan-Spanish-English-Indonesia-speaking Labrador Retriever, has a slight case of garbage gut after going on a bender with six packages of cheap frankfurters and a loose chorizo. He’s expected to make a full recovery.

Looking Back to Move Forward, Again

Last night, over drinks here in Barcelona, Elia Varela Serra and Miquel Hudin Balsa from Maneno were nice enough to share their expertise in African translation and media. Some of the conversation will probably seem like old hat to the media development crowd. The obstacles they described are, almost certainly, issues Rising Voices has already faced and considered. But Elia and Miquel are deeply knowledgeable about the region and the way information moves across it. By the end of the evening, we had something looking suspiciously like an Africa translation exchange architecture.

They pointed out some problems and gave us some new facts. Here are three major points:

– We’ve got a digital divide obstacle to overcome. The exchange’s online platform — whatever we design or select — will not be accessible to broad swaths of Africa’s linguistic and literal geography. Platforms like WordPress, etc represent a barrier to interaction, rather than a means to it, in places not yet wired to DSL standard. After a few hours, one idea that kept coming up was moving backwards: constructing an offline or partially-offline part of the exchange. I came away from the discussion convinced that to be interacting with Africa’s languages, translators and journalists in the way we’d like to be, we’re going to have to think beyond the web.

– Intra-African language and content exchange has a lot of potential. Elia and Miquel have noticed interest at Maneno for moving content from Francophone Africa’s blogs to English-speaking Africa’s blogs, and vice-versa. Once a channel exists to help Kenyan bloggers, for example, identify and read Ivorian bloggers, there’s great enthusiasm to do so, they’ve found.

– To quote Miquel: “Radio. Radio is Africa’s internet.

Let’s look at how number three might solve number one, toward facilitating number two and more. Here’s a somewhat longish workflow for moving a piece of radio news from Senegal to Korea:

LinguaPro recruits translators in four or five languages that are common both in Africa and globally. French, English, Portuguese and Spanish are the most obvious. (we’ll get to Arabic in a minute; for the moment let’s leave the Saharan divide to the side).

Meanwhile, on the continent, we recruit — with the help of regional experts like Maneno — radio journalists across several target languages and regions. Hausa, Bambara, Lingala, Wolof…

Once a week or so, each of those regional journalists set up (ideally by email or our platform; more likely by SMS) a call to the LinguaPro translator in their lingua franca. To facilitate that, the Exchange sets up Skype-in numbers for the LinguaPro translators in each node language. Our LinguaPro translators will have to be physically located in places with reliable comms and electricity and reasonably convenient time zone relationships to the continent. African language translators based in Europe seem like the obvious match there.

So we’ve got a skype number and one or more LinguaPro translators in, for example, Paris (french), Lisbon (port.), London (eng.), Madrid (Span.).

Let’s say a Wolof-speaking reporter in Senegal calls the LinguaPro translator in Paris every Monday morning. The reporter in Senegal tells the translator what was on Wolof-language radio that week. The translator and journalist work together to create a list of three-to-five Wolof stories of note, to pick a random number. They get off the phone. The LinguaPro translator drafts short summaries of these stories in English. A sentence or two.

That process repeats itself for dispatches from across the continent to LinguaPro translators. We’d do this on a small scale at first.

The summaries go to an editorial chief or body that curates it for likely markets. The summaries would likely be in English. We’d have to pick an operating language for LinguaPro; pace GV, English seems to be the likely one, but one can make a strong case for French.

The curated list of summaries then goes to Lingua, which reproduces it in languages a further step away from Africa: Korean, Indonesian, Bangla. It pays some attention to getting it into languages that match the stories’ likely markets. A Lingala radio story about a Chinese uranium mine in the Congo clearly must get into Chinese, but also might find purchase (literal, figurative) in Russian, Bengali, Urdu, English or Japanese. Those are languages spoken in places with keen interest in Chinese Africa policy and in uranium.

The summary, now translated into quite a few languages, goes out in a targeted way to our media/NGO/content-using partners. This is the sales and marketing step. Japanese content consumers get the Japanese version of the summary. Indonesians the Indonesian one. And so forth.

Everyone crosses fingers, rubs rabbits feet, slaughters a chicken and whatnot.

Users signal their interests in particular content.

The machine shifts into reverse. A Korean user, for example, wants the story from Senegal. Lingua Korea calls LinguaPro French, which calls Senegal and tells Wolof Radio that they need all of a story. Wolof Radio sends (if possible) or reads (if not) the whole story in Wolof to LinguaPro France. LinguaPro France translates Wolof>>French sends that to Lingua, which handles French>>Korean, and sends that to Editorial HQ, which moves it onto the user.

Our Korean text is Creative Commons so our user in Inchon can edit it to their liking, sell ads against it, or do more or less whatever they like to do with news content. It’s radio so there’s no copyright issue. It’s close to the ground so it’s probably an unusual angle and pretty good, which makes everyone happy.

We charge a subscription rather than a per-article rate. Something wildly cheap, similar to the price of a single freelance story or a wire dispatch. $100-200 a month say. That provides an incentive to use the service more, to get five or six pieces of content in a month for the price they usually pay to produce one item. To benefit more they would be smart to use not just our Senegal-France-Korea pipeline, but all the lines of communication we’ve established from and to other African languages, via LinguaPro nodes. In theory we’re offering them a locally-sourced, curated press aggregator for all of Africa that arrives in Korean, to order, for the price of one stringer’s dispatch.

To put this in perspective, the AP charges publications between mid-five and low seven-figures a year. WashingtonPost and other syndicates a little less, but not much less. On my desk right now I happen to have the Cambodia Daily of June 19th, 2009, which has a story from Thailand by the Washington Post. No idea what they pay for the right to reprint that, but I bet it’s more than two grand a year. They probably like the quality. But I think if we source local radio, we can compete for that space in the Cambodia Daily, currently filled by a foreign correspondent leaning heavily on a Thai fixer and charging a bundle for it.

***

The historically inclined will read the above and see something very much like the Associated Press in about 1952. Hell yeah. Worked then.

Still the devil will be, as ever, in the details. But from a perch here in fantasyland, that looks an awful lot like a system for moving a story from a small town in Senegal to a news site in Inchon. If we do it at even a moderately good volume, we should be able to charge very little and still generate a (modest) income for our radio reporter in Senegal, our LinguaPro translator in Paris, and have a nickel left over for GV’s pocket.

A last note: obviously the above map relies heavily on the characters of the participants. This is something that Elia said straight off. The reporters on the ground have to be able to parse local from regional from international. The LinguaPro nodes have to be staffed by people who are effective as cultural bridges as well as linguistic ones. These are all very unusual and precious skill sets. But, by something more than coincidence, this is also the basic profile of a Lingua member. And we know Africa is full of very good reporters whom no one abroad bothers to call. Maneno is benefitting from that daily, and would like to keep talking with us.

We have now reached the part of this egregiously long post where you all say “this sounds great, but what about….” Ready set go.

A Draft Research Agenda for The Project

Translation is easy. You just move all the letters.

The language exchange is an idea with a narrowing variety of possible objectives. A draft research agenda, below, is another step toward discovering what we’d like to build.

***

What follows is a summary of the questions at hand, an introduction, and the agenda. So this is basically a five-page list of questions. Terrifyingly, it is actually a distilled list from the longer list of issues raised at a conference in Amsterdam last month.

Here are some of the broad issues we discussed in Amsterdam:
What is the machine’s purpose other than being a translation engine? Is it a profit center for the newsroom? Is it a way to discover copy we like?  Would a discovery function necessarily imply a complimentary mechanism for moving that copy to new markets? Is it a way to aid lingua contributors to express, or follow, interests lying outside GV’s existing content?

Some technical and community organization questions come along with the editorial ones. Interestingly, those place the project at the nexus of some conversations, still very much open-ended, occurring outside the project and outside Lingua and the GV world.

Machine translation systems are becoming more sophisticated (ie, Google Translator Toolkit or Apertium), and even more so in the near future, but they appear to be most reliable between romance languages and rarely are (and will never be?) able to understand and translate nuances, puns and local jargons, particularly for so many important pairs ranging from English/Hindi to English/Bahasa Indonesia. On the other hand, some of the existing free content management systems try to integrate professional tools (translation memories, multilingual glossaries, etc.) with a growing crowd of enthusiast volunteer translators. This list includes Pootle, Worldwide Lexicon, Traduxio (open-source platforms) or industry-standards such as Lingotek and Trados, along with focused wiki-based or shared projects aimed at translating free software, videos, etc. (from translatewiki.net and Virtaal, from DotSub to TED). Aiming at being part of “social translation movement” that already includes ventures like Meedan (Arabic/English) and Yeeyan (English/Chinese) among others, our project plans to experiment with and integrate the best tools of above-mentioned systems. Also crucially important is to build upon the successful experience of the Lingua community, in order to create a working platform shared by translation amateurs, professionals, and local users, by means of easy-to-use and effective technical options.

***

This is still a very broad document inviting a pretty unwieldy discussion. Paradoxically, more voices, not fewer, are going to help us get it narrowed. But a month after Amsterdam, we’re largely done asking formative questions –  brainstorming. This document is roughly the map by which we’ll start going after the answers.

Please comment. It’s a big idea.

Coming out of the Amsterdam discussion, our goal was to study the possible uses, functions and structure of a Translation Exchange. We divided that inquiry into three major areas of investigation, which for brevity’s sake we’ve called Supply, Demand and Platforms. SUPPLY refers to both a supply of content and a supply of translators. DEMAND refers to both a demand for translated content and a demand for translation services. PLATFORMS refers to existing content management systems for translation, and to a search for the ideal platforms for a Translation Exchange.

Leonard Chien is heading the Supply investigation. Marc Herman is heading the Demand investigation and managing the project. Bernardo Parrella is heading the Platforms investigation.

For the purposes of this document we’re using a name for the exchange that popped up in Amsterdam, “LinguaPro.” That’s by no means the effort’s final name, and we’re taking suggestions.

***

Here are the issues we are looking at on the SUPPLY side:

LinguaPro and the Lingua Community:
What is the community’s level of enthusiasm for a translation exchange?
How do we distinguish LinguaPro participation from regular Lingua
participation?
How do we mitigate LinguaPro’s effect on Lingua’s normal copy flow?
What disincentives and incentives influence Lingua member’s
participation in LinguaPro?
What, if anything, is LinguaPro’s potential effect on Lingua’s current
culture?
Is there a type of content for which the Lingua community would be
particularly well- or badly-suited?
Will members see LinguaPro as a source of income?
What editorial and quality assurance mechanisms work best with the
Lingua community?
Does LinguaPro only work with Lingua people? Will LinguaPro recruit
outsiders without previous Lingua experience?

LinguaPro’s Capacity:
How much copy can LinguaPro move and how fast?
In how many languages?
Which languages?
What is LinguaPro’s capacity goals at six months from launch, a year, two
years.
Will the capacity to move copy match the needs of likely markets?

The Role of Money:

A "crossroads," get it? We were going to put a really great photo of a lady shopping for shoes here, but we couldn't get the caption to stick, and without a caption it looked like cheesecake. Sigh.

Are LinguaPro translators paid?

How is pay scaled?
Do the translators want to be paid?
Would payment create an unwelcome
prioritization effect?
Does LinguaPro offer services beyond straight translation?

LinguaPro and The Media:
Will LinguaPro handle breaking news? Will translators be “on call”?
Are members equipped to work on non-text media, such as video (likely
via DotSub) or audio in voice-over?

LinguaPro as a Content Bank:
Will LinguaPro monitor media and suggest content, similar to GV’s
editors? Is this redundant?
Would curatorial and translation be separate teams and functions?

Quality Assurance and Administration Within LinguaPro:
What is LinguaPro’s administrative structure?
Will LinguaPro use Open Translation?
Will LinguaPro integrate and/or create an environment where amateurs,
professionals and local users can interact and collaborate on open
translations?
How does LinguaPro attract and maintain members?
How does LinguaPro assure quality?

DEMAND

What is the exchange’s appeal for editors/content managers in the
following fields?

* Traditional daily news.
* Acute Humanitarian Aid and Emergency Response.
* Non-acute NGO and Humanitarian Aid.
* Professional video and online news.
* Citizen video.
* Municipal government.
* US ethnic media.
* International immigrant and diaspora media.

What are those markets’ existing translation solutions, if any?

What incentives would need to exist to persuade each of those markets to
use LinguaPro? Can such incentives exist?

Does LinguaPro function as a proxy foreign bureau?

Marketing LinguaPro:

*Is LinguaPro best sold as a service (translation) or as a product
(accessible content from multilingual sources)?
*Is there a market for a subscription model? (like a newswire)
A commission model? (like a translation agency)
A mix of those two?
*What editorial functions  — copy editing, for example –will LinguaPro
offer, and which does it leave in the user’s hands?
*Is LinguaPro, for purposes of working with partners, journalists or
translators?

LinguaPro and copyright:

Will LinguaPro content be Creative Commons.
Will LinguaPro content accept a limited rights arrangement?
Will LinguaPro seek copyright agreements with publishers?

PLATFORMS:

Will LinguaPro use only open-source tools, maybe created from scratch?
Is it better to customize one of those platforms, or tweak with the
promising Google Wave?

Does LinguaPro use machine translation?
Does LinguaPro use Translation Memories and glossaries to refine a
translation with contextualized, localized or personal additions?

Does each language have its own platform, as opposed to a larger, open
platform where people can freely jump from one language to another, and
compare  different translations in the making?

Does LinguaPro seek to lower the technical barriers for newbies?

Does LinguaPro have specific platforms, with related sets of tools,
instructions, etc, for non-romance languages?

Does LinguaPro enable open crowd-sourcing on each project, or always
put an editor in charge, a la Lingua’s current method?

THE END. FOR THE MOMENT.

Weaving a polyglot Internet & EU translation stats

With the survey circulating within Lingua community and the first draft of our research agenda on its way, here is an interesting reading about Weaving a polyglot Internet. Highlighting the growing worldwide web and the separation of languages, the articles explains that despite the current “increasing linguistic diversity” (English 464 mln people, Chinese 321 mln, Spanish, 131 mln, etc.) there are still “insufficient linkages between translated content”. Therefore the need for open, voluntary, and collaborative translation ventures, including several projects already active – such as TED, DotSUB and of course GV Lingua.

Among the various challenges and opportunities emerging in/from this new landscape, the article concludes that “Participatory translation animated in the context of multicultural Communities of Practices can foster the sense of achievement and belonging.”

Also worth noting the Index Translationum proposed by UNESCO, in particular a PDF released in November 2008 (An overview and analysis of translation statistics across Europe) with some interesting findings – ie, in the mid 1990’s the growth of English seems to have reached a ceiling with at around 60% predominance as original language of cultural goods, while the three top leaders for global translations are France, Germany and China.

We’re Starting to Get Our Heads Around the Questions

Here’s a general update of what’s going on this week at Project Translation Exchange:

I would caption this photo but it's really quite perfect without it.

Bernardo’s wrapping up his trip to Italy. As part of his trip he met with Francesco Magnacavallo, who co-manages www.blogo.it (Italiano). Blogo is the largest blog network in Italy, with 250 writers on 45 topics. Francesco had read about us and is interested in two potential partnerships. They need a basic translation shop. And more conceptually, they discussed some targeted translation and something closer to a consultant/translator relationship, where Lingua’s crowd-sourcing capability might help them target their content distribution.

The first thing I thought of personally was that this is a more specific version of what we’d discussed with Kevin from New American Media. It’s the first discussion with a potential demand-side partner that generated evidence of interest in not just translation, but a curatorial/editorial function.

On the other side of the world, Leonard is sending out a brief survey to Lingua’s members today (if you’re a lingua member and not yet gotten it as you read this, wait fifteen minutes and look again.) It’s really a survey for a survey. Just as we’re starting to understand the basic contours of the demand side, we’re realizing we’ll probably save time and effort to have a corresponding profile of the supply side.

We’re on the hunt for an academic with the right mix of statistical savvy and public spirited-ness to carry out a little survey. (yes, I’m already talking to Chris Salzburg) We’re going to take a proudly stat-geeky look at the lingua community’s feelings about a language exchange. If you’ve got thoughts on what’s essential for such a measurement, have at it in the comments.

This isn’t going to happen tomorrow. Forgive the poor metaphor, but need to know at least a little more about what sort of boat we’re building, and where we propose to sail it, before we can test people’s feelings about signing up to crew. But a survey is coming. The little pre-survey that go out today consists of a short set of questions Leonard’s cooked up. Tell us what you want to know in the next go-round. In this case, more is more.

Finally today, pace Ivan’s comments in Amsterdam on potential NGO and development-world partners, I’m working on a meeting with the Development Executive Group. They happen to have an office in Barcelona (they’re based in Washington). DevEx is a for-profit human resources shop for the international development community (or industry, if you prefer). If you want to do logistics work with the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, you probably look at DevEx for professional development resources. They also do normal consulting work for a predictable cast of 10,000-pound gorillas. Places like Oracle. And they produce their own development newswire, edited out of Washington. While most of the issues they touch are international, their content is strictly English. Huh?

As a private sector demand measurement, they’re an intruiging outfit. And perhaps a partner?

OTT and Amsterdam (part III)

The third and last of David Sasaki’s dispatches from Amsterdam:

On our last day together at the Global Voices apartment we met to discuss editorial process, the next GV site redesign, the 2010 GV summit, our next fundraiser, and how to better incorporate the community at large in decision making and strategy. Present were Leonard, Solana, Sami, Marc, Ivan, Jer, and me.

Editorial Process and GV Site Redesign

Most of the morning we spent discussing the next re-design of the Global Voices website, but we also realized that many of the design decisions were directly related to editorial decisions. (For example, should we require that every article has an accompanying image? Should we give greater representation to video and audio? Can we geo-locate posts down to specific cities or even neighborhoods? Should we engage in more analysis and opinion? How do we prioritize content and feature the best posts?) We all agreed that in the next re-design of the website we should strive for a format that is more like a portal or online magazine so that content does not “disappear” off the front page so quickly.

Jer showed us a preview of the beta site where he is experimenting with some design changes. He stressed that he is extremely busy creating the system which will coordinate translations of posts across all Global Voices websites rather than depending on the English website as the mandatory hub of translations. We applauded Solana’s excellent work on the special coverage pages, which give more context to current events and point readers to the best related citizen media content. We agreed that we should try to create more awareness about the special topic pages, especially when there is buzz around a certain event.

We also discussed how we can improve writing on the website. Recruiting volunteer copy editors is one strategy. We also discussed creating an optional online media training courses for editors and authors. (For those who are self-motivated, News University has several free online classes including “Cleaning Your Copy“, which I highly recommend.) There were various suggestions to feature more photography (photo essays?) and multimedia on the site. We discussed mainstream media sites that might be interested in syndicating some of our English-language content including The Week, The Economist, and Foreign Policy, and there was also mention of seeking more partnerships with non-English media outlets, such as our collaboration with Colombia’s El Espectador, which features some GV content in Spanish in their online and print versions.

The Next Global Voices Summit

As has been previously discussed, we were not able to organize a Global Voices Summit this year because of the state of the economy and the resulting difficulty of fundraising such an event. However, the board of directors have stressed the importance of holding another GV Summit by the first quarter of 2010. A number of possible locations were discussed, but we all agreed that three important factors in deciding the eventual location are: 1.) fundraising and cost of travel, 2.) local co-hosts, and 3.) travel visas. We each committed to getting in touch with potential co-hosts for the 2010 summit. Ivan and Georgia will discuss the summit with funders. If you are aware of relevant organizations that might be interested in co-hosting the GV summit, please get in touch with Georgia and Ivan.

The possibility of organizing regional summits that piggyback on other events (such as what took place at American University in Cairo) was also discussed, but there was general agreement that we would all prefer to have a community-wide summit in order to interact across regions (and to diversify the beverage cultural exchange night).

Marketing, Promotion, and Online Fundraising

We began discussing ways to promote and market Global Voices and its content. Among the ideas mentioned:

• Promote the daily digest.
• Re-tweet twitter messages from GV
• Design better badges and use them on our blogs
• Print more stickers and distribute them at conferences and events
• Design attractive comfortable t-shirst and sell them
• Create posters that can be printed out easily for conferences
• Gather positive quotes about GV
• Create a radio spot to be played on PRX and for use by podcasters willing to promote GV

Global Voices is funded by grants from foundations. While those grants have allowed us to just barely get by, our funders would like to see us raising a larger percentage of our overall income from online donations. Georgia has agreed to spearhead an online fundraising campaign. Ivan encouraged us to think about Mobile Accord to enable mobile-based fundraising. If you are interested in working on the fundraising campaign please get in touch with Georgia.

Encouraging More Community Involvement in Workflow and Strategizing

One of the biggest challenges for Global Voices over the past year has been to establish an independent institution in order to sustain and further our mission without creating unnecessary hierarchy and bureaucracy. As a reminder, we are a Netherlands-based NGO that is governed by a board of seven directors. Debbie is the representative of all Global Voices volunteers and Amira is the representative for paid staff. Then there is a core management team to direct the various GV projects, and several teams of editors based on region, language, Lingua site, and subject. Each of those smaller groups tends to have its own mailing list with internal discussions. It is practically impossible for anyone to stay up to date on what happens in every corner of the Global Voices universe.

Still, we identified four processes that can improve greater participation, communication, and transparency in the management of Global Voices:

• Disseminating info – when a group within GV has a meeting that is relevant for the wider community, it should write a brief re-cap to the wider group. Notes from board meetings are now being distributed on the mailing list. IRC meetings are also good for disseminating information across the community.
• Encouraging more community involvement in strategizing and prioritizing – we have set up feedback.globalvoicesonline.org where you can vote on specific suggestions about how Global Voices can be improved and where we should be heading in the future. You can also make new suggestions. (More on this later in a separate email.)
• Developing a road map – We have yet to have a community-wide discussion about where we’d like to see Global Voices in 1, 2, and 5 years. Such a discussion could happen on the mailing lists, via blog posts, or on the wiki. Ideally we can have it offline also at the next GV summit.
• Assigning tasks – Often times the same idea comes up over and over again every year, such as “create a book based on content from GV” or “Improve the GV authors’ guide”, but they never get carried out because we haven’t developed a good project management system to delegate tasks and check on their status. We discussed the possibility of using a system like Basecamp or tasks.globalvoicesonline.org but in the end came to the conclusion that such systems are not realistic and that we will need to stick to email as our primary way to delegating tasks and checking up on their status.

We agreed to focus energy on feedback.globalvoicesonline.org and to organize bi-weekly or monthly IRC chats with a topical focus and with a different host every time.

OTT conference & Translation Exchange (part II)

And here is part two in the recap of our week discussion in Amsterdam (courtesy of David Sasaki), still focused on the Global Voices Translation Exchange.

As Ivan has written about recently on the site, we were given a grant by the Ford Foundation to research, design, and build a translation exchange which facilitates the flow of information across languages. Much of the discussion by Global Voicers at the Open Translation Tools conference focused on how this translation exchange can best take advantage of new tools to improve the translation workflow and, potentially, to help translators get paid for their work. There was also some more theoretical discussion about the difference between volunteer translators who might occasionally do professional-quality translating and professional translators who volunteer some of their time for projects like Global Voices. (We discovered, for example, that nearly all of the translators on the Dutch version of Global Voices are professionals who volunteer their time to a project they believe in.)

On Monday June 22 Ivan facilitated a session at the conference about the GV Translation Exchange. News and information used to travel from one country to another via foreign correspondents who lived abroad and would send news from foreign countries back to their home country. For example, Xinhua, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and TeleSUR all have correspondents who live around the world and send pieces of news back to China, the UK, the Middle East, and Latin America respectively. A decrease in advertising revenue, however, is forcing news agencies to close down their foreign bureaus and lay off their foreign correspondents. News agencies are now looking for more affordable international content. One possibility is to translate articles from newspapers in one country and sell those translations to newspapers in another country. For example, if the Guardian wants to report on the recent coup in Honduras, but does not have the money to send a reporter, it could instead request a translation of an article from the Honduras-based La Prensa. This is the general idea behind the translation exchange.

One of the questions that came up repeatedly with respect to the
translation exchange was about demand. During times of crisis there will be high demand for translations of certain types of content about particular topics. For example, recently there was a high demand for the translation of content in Farsi coming out of Iran. But once that dies down, how do you maintain a translation exchange and how do you measure the demand of what content people would like to see translated, and what they are willing to pay to make those translations available. In fact, a whole other session was organized just to discuss the issue of demand for translated content. Ethan, Ivan, and Marc all said they would be willing to pay for translated content about sports (sumo, cycling, and soccer respectively) while Leonard would like to be able to read more Korean literature and Anna speaks so many languages that she has little need for other translators at all.

Though the translation exchange is likely to focus on news-related content, there was also discussion about whether or not we should consider other types of information such as reports from NGO’s and human rights organizations, literature, and even technical manuals.

After Open Translation Tools concluded, we still had two more days of Global Voices meetings to discuss the translation exchange. Present during those two days were Marc, Sami, Ivan, Georgia, Paula, Solana, Leonard, Anna, Jeremy, Bernardo, and me. Ivan framed the translation exchange first and foremost as a research project and much of the discussion during the two days of meetings was about defining what questions and topics needed to be researched to find out if a translation exchange is feasible and sustainable. Some of those questions were:

What is the mission of the translation exchange?
Should the translation exchange focus only on text or also audio and video?
How will the translation exchange relate to Lingua and how can it
benefit Lingua?
Where is there a demand for translation and what types of content do those groups want translated?
Should the translation exchange be volunteer or should translators be paid for their work?
What is the best price to charge for translations?
What is the best model to pay translators for their work?
What is the best reputation system to use to track the work of
translators and how does that system benefit the translators?
What about non-media groups?
How do we license translations from the translation exchange? Do we force all partners to publish the translations under Creative Commons licenses?
Should a goal of the exchange be to build a translation memory corpus?
If so, which tool(s) do we use?
What is the ideal relationship between the translation exchange and the larger Global Voices community? Can Advocacy and Rising Voices benefit from the translation exchange?
How do we set up a mechanism for judging quality of translations?
What other media groups should Global Voices and the translation
exchange partner with in order to scale up?

These are all questions without easy answers. Marc, Bernardo, and Leonard certainly have their work cut out for them as they seek the answers. As they do so, they’ll be sharing their thoughts with us on the Translation Exchange blog.

One potential media parter for the translation exchange is New American Media, a nationwide association of over 700 ethnic media organizations in the United States. Kevin Weston from New American Media (NAM) visited us on the second day to give an introduction to NAM and to discuss their translation needs as a starting point for possible future collaborations. NAM serves as a newswire for ethnic media outlets in the United States, many of which are in languages other than English. They currently use in-house translators to translate select articles and editorials into other languages. Ideally NAM would like to consistently make much of their content available in 6 – 8 languages. NAM is also involved in marketing campaigns which they translate and sell to ethnic media outlets. They use costly professional translators to translate the campaigns. (One recent campaign was to spread awareness about the US census, but Kevin says that NAM is also discussing producing marketing campaigns for major corporations like Target.) NAM would like to translate as much of their content into as many languages as possible, but they haven’t been able to because of the prohibitive cost of professional translation.

After Kevin left we agreed that we need to do more research about New American Media to find out if they are an ideal media partner to serve as a ‘test case’ for the translation exchange. Are members of NAM’s editorial community interested in using Global Voices content in their ethnic papers? (For example, The Liberian Journal published in Minneapolis might be interested in carrying some Global Voices articles about Liberia.) We also need to find out what, if anything, NAM would be willing to pay for translations of their content. Other multilingual media associations that could be potential partners include Eurotopics, Eurasianet, AllAfrica, IPS, and others.

And that, my friends, was about it for the two days of meetings about the translation exchange. If you have ideas about the translation exchange, there are notes and suggestions on the Global Voices wiki, and more will be posted on this very blog. Please stay tuned!

El Oso Blogs the OTT Conference

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Below, the first episode in what’s rumored to be a three-part summary, by David Sasaki, of last week’s Online Translation Tools conference in Amsterdam. To read this document in its original home, with little pop up photos and a small cartoon of a bear peering Kilroy-like over a wall, click here. Or just keep reading:

On September 19, 2005 a tall, dark, and handsome Taiwanese blogger who goes by the strange name of “Portnoy” decided that he would start translating select blog posts from Global Voices into Chinese. His first translation was of a post by Indonesian blogger Enda Nasution which summed up the week’s news from Indonesia through the eyes of its bloggers. Portnoy wasn’t asked to translate the article into Chinese, and he certainly wasn’t paid for it. Nor did he have any tools or a community of fellow translators to help him out. He simply published the volunteer translation on his personal blog because he felt it was important to share the information from Global Voices across a language divide. Portnoy was ahead of his time. Fast forward three and a half years and the number of translators on Global Voices is greater than the number of authors and editors. Our articles are regularly translated into about 20 different languages and Jer has developed an entire system within WordPress to manage and organize the translations of articles. Additionally, we are no longer alone. Meedan is translating articles and conversations about current events in the Middle East. Yeeyan serves as a hub for volunteer translators who translate between Chinese and English. And TED has had much success recruiting volunteers to translate and subtitle their videos. Furthermore, a number of open source programmers have begun developing tools to serve this ever-expanding group of volunteer translators. Those tools must also compete with proprietary tools like Google’s new Translator Toolkit, which was recently used by volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic. Aspriation Tech, an NGO based in San Francisco, invited a number of translators, programmers, and publishers to Amsterdam last week to discuss how the social translation movement can be made more efficient, sustainable, and fun. Representing Global Voices at the gathering were Solana, Leonard, Georgia, Ivan, Ethan, Silvia, Anna, Rezwan, Jer, Paula, Marc, and me. For those interested in learning more, notes from all the sessions are available on the Open Translation Tools wiki, Ethan has a nice summary blog post, photos are on Flickr, and updates are on Twitter, and more related blog posts are available here. For those of you who wish to learn more about open source translation software, a valuable guide has been published on FLOSSManuals. There is another guide about open source “video translation”. For more information about the history of Lingua, Leonard has made an excellent timeline and Chris Salzberg has done thorough academic research on the community.