BBC hosts translated conversation between Arabic and English speakers
The BBC experiment connected web users across languages
The BBC appears to be thinking seriously about using translation to connect its global audience online.
On Thursday the World Service hosted a cross-language discussion between English, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Persian, Indonesian and Spanish speakers with Google’s Machine Translation service providing translations.
What ensued was a bizarre disjointed discussion about nothing much in particular, resembling a collection of spam attacks.
‘I would l like to use this opportunity to introduce you about Somaliland’ … ‘May we be healthy, live calm and help those who need us most’ … ‘Someone knows Bournemouth, UK? Is an interesting city to visit?’ … ‘I want to tell to the world that Jesus is coming. read Jhon 3:16 please look for in on the BIBLE’.
Full marks for the effort and the vision to think about using translation. But perhaps the BBC should be talking to some of the players in the field who could help them build a more useful cross-language debate with better translation.
They could have used the translation community from Global Voices Lingua for example, with the translation tools developed by Worldwide Lexicon which enable humans to edit and improve MT translations right there on the page, supplying data that is housed on an open source translation memory (WWL has just released a brilliant translation plugin for Wordpress I’ll be blogging about shortly).
It’s also worth comparing what the BBC did with Meedan. Our cross-language Arabic-English interface – which clearly shows the status of a comment translation, the original language it was posted in, the direction of translation, who is author of the comment and who translated it, and whether it is a human or automatic translation – is leaps and bounds ahead of this early BBC experiment.
Still, it’s great to see a major publisher on the internet thinking creatively about crossing languages, which does benefit to everyone in the space working to build the polyglot web.
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