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.

Picture by respres.

I read a great post today on Global Voices Advocacy presenting the incredible power of Twitter as a mechanism for enabling communication and better networking despite state repression.

So much is said about Twitter, but not a huge amount about its emerging role in the Middle East.  So it’s great to see this conversation emerge.  It will no doubt enrich and forward the ‘what have bloggers done for the Middle East’ discussion – which has started to feel stale.

But two important caveats need to be made about Twitter in the Middle East before we simply assume that it already plays a critical social role.

First, the user base. In a post published last month, Spot on PR estimated there are only just over 14,000 Twitter users in the region.  Forty percent of these users are in the UAE, and well over half are in the Gulf. Just 11 percent are in the Levant – reminding us that this tool is largely used by web users in rich countries and geeks + activists in poorer ones.

Plus when you compare these stats to Facebook – you start to realise that in fact the tool has some way to go.  According to O’Reilly Research, Facebook boasts 1.8 million users in Egypt alone.  Egyptians love the internet, they love social networking, but to date they are not mad about Twitter or don’t know about it.

Second, Twitter crucially lacks social translation and markup tools.  Social translation is key to enabling Middle East users reach wider audiences – Google MT API is just not enough when you think that ICANN predicts the next 20 million Arab users of the web will not be speaking English.

Markup is important for enabling users to better share provenance information about important Twitter voices – crucial in the Middle East where trust and credibility are key.

Nevertheless an important article this one – well worth a read.

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!’