Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

These are some introductory notes for the October 17th IRC meeting with the folks from Global Voices—Thanks to Rebecca for organizing the discussion!

Bloga- what?

Blogamundo! “Mundo” is the Spanish word for “world.”

(And Portuguese too, for that matter. Ehem.)

Blogamundo.com is a new project to try to increase the amount of translation among blogospheres. (And, eventually, other -ospheres.)

Global Voices has already done some great work in creating initial links across linguistic divides. The glimpses of other cultures are always fascinating. But I’ve often had the experience of reading a Global Roundup on GV and seeing a tantalizing description of a post, only to see a link to a post in a language that I can’t read.

Doh!

Don’t get me wrong; there is great value in these peeks into other blogospheres, but in some cases the post on the other end of those links is well-nigh crying out to be translated in full.

Why isn’t there more translation happening?

An obvious question is: why isn’t more translation already happening on the web? Or if it is, why isn’t it easier to find?

After thinking about the problem for a while, here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Translation is hard work. Joi Ito wrote about that fact a while back. (I’ll disagree with his claim that translation isn’t fun, though… well, it can be fun. More on this later.)
2. ”CAT” translation tools haven’t hit the web. “Computer Aided Translation” (CAT) tools exist, but they’re expensive and built on top of proprietary software (with at least one notable exception), so they’re used almost exclusively by professional translators.
3. Translators don’t get to put their personalities on the web. There are plenty of translators who translate off and on, but to date there’s really no place where translators can show their work online. There should be.
4. New translators don’t know where to start. And while even a simple CAT tool could help an amateur translator to improve their proficiency, few even know such a thing exists.

Have you ever heard of a CAT tool?

Let’s make it easier

Blogamundo is aimed at addressing these problems. We’re building a simple browser-based CAT tool and a network around it. The network will handle:

• Aggregating content by language or tag
• Republishing translated content
• A mechanism for requesting translation of specific content

And in the longer term:

• Lexicon collaboration, exchange, export (under a Creative Commons license)
• A skill-measuring system for helping professional translators show they’ve got the chops
• A translation market for translators to promote and market their skills

Let’s work together

I think it makes sense for us to talk about a simple task:

How can Blogamundo help Global Voices to organize translation around the “dead end” links in the roundups?