What is the relationship between translation and intellectual production? It is not obvious, you might think. Translation, by necessity, does not provide new insights but rather makes existing knowledge available in another language. If everyone spoke English it would not really be an issue.

Picture courtesy Hishaam Siddiqi on Flickr under CC license Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivativeWorks

At Meedan we do think there is a deep link. Let me try to explain why with some tidbits from the recent Arab Thought Foundation annual conference, FIKR9, that we were lucky to attend.

For many at FIKR9, the idea of making intellectual production available in Arabic was a matter of pride. Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, containing within its breadth a vast resource of human scholarship and innovation through the ages. Arabic is a language so intimately connected with the intellectual history of Islam and the modern sense of shared cultural affinity within what Prince Khalid Al Faisal, President of the Arab Thought Foundation, refers to as Al Umma Al Arabiya (the Arab Nation).

There was real concern from many quarters about the dearth of intellectual production on the web in Arabic, not least Jordanian social entrepreneur Maher Kaddoura. Google estimates that less than one percent of all web content is in the language – a widely quoted figure at the conference. ICANN’s Middle East officer
recently predicted that the next twenty million web users in the region will speak little or no English – a warning perhaps that Arabic speaking users risk being trapped in a tiny corner of the web, unable to contribute to global intellectual production. When you factor in the wide disparity in cheap access to good internet, the web will have contributed to global knowledge gaps, rather than helping to alleviate them.

So this is the first point – translation is a pressing duty of those interested in increasing access to knowledge around the world. Societies are not going to learn English en masse at a rate capable of checking these growing knowledge imbalances. Instead, we need methods for scaling translation.

The other issue is to do with the value of translation itself. It would be a reasonable premise to suggest that in periods of high intellectual activity, societies invest in translation. Why? There is evidence to suggest that access to diverse perspectives enables better intellectual outputs. To quote Clay Shirky, it’s not how many people you know but how many kinds of people you know. He cites Ronald Burt’s research into the way in which a major US electronics firm was able to generate new ideas. When the company piloted a scheme to harvest ideas from across the company, the managers in charge were more impressed by ideas generated by people whose social networks included employees from outside their department. In other words, access to diverse networks and forms of knowledge improves our ability to innovate.

Ed Bice suggests this is the critical question of the digital age: the extent to which the internet will ‘increase the network diversity of information exchange or whether, given free choice to create our own channels and refine our information networks, we will evolve distribution structures that narrow our networks, and subsequently, narrow our thinking.’

Translation increases network diversity and it reduces knowledge divides. All of this also increases the likelihood of Arabic users contributing more content in Arabic, for three reasons: first, there is more intellectual output to build upon; second, Arabic users know that their Arabic content can be translated into other languages; and third, Arabic-speaking users who see other Arabic-speaking users writing in Arabic are more likely to contribute in Arabic themselves. And the beautiful thing is we now have a model for doing it at scale without too much cost.

Translation today can be conducted cheaply and to high quality by a combination of machines and humans. Automated translation can provide a first draft which can be edited by one or many individual translators working together on small chunks of text – much like a Wikipedia page entry. Translation revisions show the lineage of the translation, and help alert moderators to problems or vandalism. And the fun part is that each translation contributes to the improvement of the automated translation – so you can continually translate more, and better. The humans focus increasingly on the really hard bits.

The list of organizations working on this model is wide, and Meedan is in the thick of it. If we want to make the web more polyglot, and increase the amount of Arabic content in the next ten years, we need to put energy into the tools to make scaled social translation a natural and intuitive publishing gesture on the web. This is not to suggest that professional translators are going to be out of a job any time soon – quite the reverse, the more we translate content the more demand there will be for the services of translators with real expertise for the most difficult translation problems. But respect for the translation profession should not be a straitjacket into which we put the vision of a polyglot web.

At FIKR9, Tom Trewinnard and I took part in a social media roundtable with some of the best thinkers in the region’s emerging social media landscape. We put these arguments to the group and suggested that to be effective, our number one priority was to enable intellectual production to circulate more freely. The nub of the challenge then is to enable scaled social translation; to make translation of small pieces of text a normative publishing gesture on the web for those who have the skills.

This really depends on our being able to make minimum interventions into existing social practices on the web, to build upon existing social behaviours for sharing content, and to create solutions to the problem that harness the incentives that have infused social services such as Twitter with global community activity – our collective desire for social recognition and our eagerness for human contact premised on cooperation.

This was originally posted on the Meedan blog.

What do the next ten years hold for creativity, innovation and intellectual production in the Middle East? Among the presentations to the Arab Thought Foundation’s ninth annual conference, FIKR9, were broadly two competing narratives for how the region should evolve.

Enthusiasm for the future: The young participants of FIKR9 Youth Program with HRH Prince Khalid Al Faisal in Beirut. Picture Courtesy of Hibr on Flickr, Licensed CC Attribution Share-Alike NonCommercial 3.0.

The dominant narrative suggests that the region can harness its ‘youth bulge’ to create a knowledge economy. This can happen from within the existing political structures, and will fuse Gulf oil wealth and investment expertise with the ever growing pool of human talent from across the region.

This narrative likes to focus on STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine). Educational achievement in these areas can create hi-tech industries and cutting edge research centres that will underpin innovation in areas such as renewable energy, petrochemicals, and nanotechnology.

You can see the mechanics of this strategy already taking root. Gulf money is being invested to build truly world-class research infrastructure, such as laboratories and libraries. Qatar’s Education City or the King Abdullah City for Science and Technology are two good examples. Foreign talent from outside the Arab world is being hired at a premium to train local talent, stimulate new research and foster a productive learning environment.

It is a strategy that gels well with the existing political institutions of the region, as the conference made clear. In his introductory notes, Arab Thought Foundation President HRH Prince Khalid Al Faisal, member of the Saudi royal family and governor of Makkah Province, said that the Arab world needed to lead global society toward a ‘sustainable future’ by ‘accelerating development in Science and Technology’.

With their immense resources and access to human capital from the wider Arab world and Asia, the Gulf states can build hi-tech industries and the talent pool needed to power them – a strategy that would replace oil and gas, and bring many wider infrastructure and economic benefits to society – without needing to change the way in which society works in any fundamental way.

That’s where the second narrative comes in, most prominently displayed here by Professor Burhan Ghalioun, Director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne. The fact that he works from France is testament to the fact that his views are unpalatable in the Arab world. No one said it, but these views are also incompatible with the ‘knowledge economy’ thesis.

This narrative says that the notion of a knowledge economy is impossible without a fundamental change in the way in which Arab elites view critical thinking. For Ghalioun, critical thinking is inseparable from the notion of a knowledge economy. But for critical thinking to take root depends on elites relinquishing power. So the nub of it is that building a knowledge economy depends on building democracy.

Ghalioun’s thesis is not new – it notably draws on the ideas of Hisham Sharabi’s Neopatriarchy which was written in the 1980s – but it is still deeply challenging to hear the case being made so passionately at an elite Arab forum from within the Arab world. It is an ironic inversion of the very title of the event – Arab Thought Foundation. Ghalioun is saying, “Arab thought” is a contradiction in terms, and you the elites are the reason why this is so. He also poured scorn on the title of the event (Shaping the Future .. Arab’s role?), suggesting that the Arab world has no positive future to look forward to. But one thing is for sure, no non-Arab could make this case so boldly without being labeled an out-of-touch Orientalist. We certainly have to respect the Arab Thought Foundation for inviting him. It is not easy to welcome someone to a conference when you know his purpose for being there is to question the very forum you have established.

No other presentation elicited so much feedback from the audience, both positive and negative, so clearly Ghalioun’s words had hit a chord. Moreover, he spoke in high classical Arabic with a rhetorical eloquence that resonated with the audience, a further irony in a presentation that on face value to a western outsider might look like an unhelpful polemic rant. Let me quote from my notes:

In the Arab world we have a multifaceted crisis. No one is interested in the future, young people don’t have a future. All our policies are built on ignoring the future. Private interests trump public ones. We need many more jobs than we are creating. We have focused on closed nationalisms. We count on foreign protection for security. We are paying the price for nationalism rather than supporting each other. We need cooperation. We have feudal systems, we have princes. No one is asking the people. We have closed political regimes where political interests are linked to financial interests. We have great potential. But instead of asking people to think and criticize we have a system of tutorship. We have packaged people like sardines. This is why the Arab world has no more value than Hungary. The people are marginalized. A very small minority has control. We have deprived ninety percent from human resources. A small group has monopolized power. We need the blood of the Arab body to circulate, not just flow to one limb. Otherwise it will die.

Clearly, Ghalioun’s suggestion that Arab countries do not think about the future of their societies is wrong. Arab countries from Syria to Saudi Arabia think the future of the region is a knowledge economy, built from within the existing political structures. Much as China has built a powerful export economy from within the structures of the existing Communist regime, so the countries of the Middle East believe they must work from where they are, not a fantasy democracy land. The alternative to the current regimes they believe is the sectarian bloodshed of Iraq or the erratic theocracy of Iran.

But the ‘knowledge economy’ thesis is also fraught with challenges. As Parag Khanna argued, the countries of the region have high barriers to mobility which limit trade and the free flow of talent. Daniel Warner, former the chief of human resources at Apple, argued cogently for greater mindshare and investment in entrepreneurship in the region as a strategy for building human capital. Jordanian social entrepreneur Maher Kaddoura asked how the region would make more intellectual production available to wider Arab publics online in light of the fact that many do not speak English. Privately friends noted that the unwillingness of some countries to grant citizenship impedes the long term development of scientific communities needed to build the knowledge economy. There were also calls at the conference for improved legal frameworks and training that could underpin a successful rejuvenation of trade and business growth in the region.

One thing we can be sure of though is that in any plan for building human capital and knowledge industries, critical thinking matters. This is as true for scientists as much as for researchers in the humanities. We may just find that the highly skilled science community the region seeks to build is the vanguard for other kinds of change we can scarcely begin to predict.

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.

George discussing Meedan's approach to collaborative translation at the Centre for Translation Studies

There was a great turn out, particularly from Arabic students, and I was absolutely amazed be the quality of the feedback.

We discussed Meedan’s approach and how to get started using the tools, and I tried to demonstrate how getting involved would increase translators’ opportunities by boosting their profile, increasing their technology awareness and honing their translation skills with a live audience.

I used a delicious tag to organize pages for discussion and then used the new beta Delicious browsebar to scroll through them (with one or two minor slip-ups). You can see my notes on this google doc.

The students were really interested in ensuring quality and resolving disputes.

Students get to see Meedan's cross-language news sharing site for the first time

One suggested we should have a translation discussion page alongside the translation history of any comment – a great idea. Another suggested a feed of human translated content – a feature we’ve had in the pipeline for some time at Meedan.

There was also a suggestion that you should be able to receive updates for any piece of content you create on Meedan. Perhaps you’ve written a comment or posted a link and want to know when someone translates it. Or maybe you’re a translator and you’d like to be informed if someone modifies your edits.

These seem like such brilliant ideas – and it is always refreshing to hear them live from an audience.

So I hope we can take this presentation to other universities and translation studies centres in the coming months because it has proved to be a great way for us to learn, and get the Meedan message out at the same time.

We’ve so far spoken in the UK at London Metropolitan, Westminster, and SOAS in addition to Leeds – let us know if you’d like to hear from us at your university.

We are @meedan on Twitter or I am gweyman [at] meedan.net.

Al Arabiya television channel has been fined for deciding not to broadcast an interview. Courtesy Mr T. in DC.

It’s the daily trade of the television output editor, chopping what doesn’t meet the grade to maintain the daily news agenda in a time sensitive schedule.

But now an Arabic language channel in the Gulf might have to rethink its editorial chain of command after a court in Dubai slapped down a $27,000 fine for not broadcasting an interview it recorded with a Saud royal.

The decision inflicted ‘emotional, moral and social damage on the prince’s status as a royal,’ according to his lawyer.

Judge Ahmad Eisa of Dubai’s appeal court agreed, ruling that Al Arabiya had ‘breached the nobility and morality of journalism’ in refusing to air the interview with Prince Dr Saif Al Islam Bin Saud Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud.

The Prince, who sought five times the level of compensation ordered by the court, was upset that Al Arabiya failed to broadcast the interview despite having advertised it on air, according to Gulf News.

The channel had flown Prince Dr Saif Al Islam to Dubai especially to record the piece.

Al Arabiya countered that it had full rights to the interview and so could choose when to air it.

Menassat has taken a leading role in reporting press, democracy and Human Rights issues in the Middle East. Picture by *RICCIO "il colore del ricordo inganna"

The Middle East online news site Menassat is facing an uncertain future today after its leading funder threatened to pull out.

Menassat reporters were considering their options on Wednesday as the company’s Dutch backers, Free Voice were reviewing whether it would fund for another month.

According to Menassat staff, Free Voice – a media advocacy group that supports press freedoms and balanced journalism in the Middle East – had long running financial concerns, following irregularities surrounding a former CEO.

The news will come as a shock to the Middle East media community which holds Menassat in high regard.

The site is based in Beirut with correspondents around the region and seeks to support Arab media professionals to exchange opinions and information free of censorship.

It also took a innovative online approach setting up a community platform on Ning for networking and publishing its content in Arabic and English.

Menassat has also taken a leading role in nurturing talent, including the reporters Saseen Kawzally, Alexandra Sandels and Simba Russeau.

Do you think Menassat should survive? Tell Muez i Diin Street what you think.

Google has admitted it faces major challenges in widening access to the internet in the Arab World.

Limited infrastructure and language problems in the Middle East hinder access to the best of what the web has to offer, the search engine said in launch post of the  Google Arabia blog.

With just one percent of all internet content in Arabic, Middle East audiences still have some way to go before they can enjoy the breadth of content other language communities have access to.

But in a post brimming with confidence, the Google team said it was ‘excited’ about meeting the opportunities available in the region.

It has two growing teams in Cairo and Dubai, the Google Arabia blog reported.

Google also suggested machine translation technologies provided by it and other services had already put Arabic speakers in touch with content formerly out of reach.

The internet was ‘fundamentally’ changing business and social life all over the Middle East, Google said.

Readers were on the whole excited to see Google reaching out in Arabic.

One respondent called Ahmed simply said: ‘Welcome Google’.

Fahad, another commenter, said: ‘How our language is the most beautiful to learn!’