Ready, Set, Go!

Hello all. It would appear everyone is chomping at the bit, which is nice to see. To encourage that sort of foolishness, and to alleviate any confusion over whether I’m to post something before Ivan formally announces this project, I figured I’d just start.

Welcome to the Global Voices Translation Exchange Project. We’re going to assess and ideally build a translation exchange. It will probably be for news content. It might be for other types of content too. A translation exchange, insofar as we’ve defined it so far, is a mechanism for moving content across linguistic lines in an efficient, low-cost manner. It’s also a mechanism for determining what sort of content to put through that efficient, low-cost process. Finally, it might be a mechanism for placing some of that content, or at least flagging it, in media outlets that would love to publish it, but don’t know it exists, because they can’t read or search the source language.

As threatened during an organizational meeting in lovely Amsterdam last week, here too is a picture of Paio: my dog. Paio is a gypsy term for a non-gypsy, and in Catalunya in the eighties was also slang for “tio” or roughly “dude.” I was under the impression that naming a dog Paio was like naming a dog “shiksa.” Having improved my ear for Catalan, I now realize it’s actually more like naming him “cracker.” So that’s interesting. The picture is two years old, as is Paio. He’s grown. This concludes our discussion of my dog. Now onto the matters at hand. Everyone say something. You know you want to.