Thoughts after the Global Voices Summit
After sleeping and thinking a bit about everything read and heard during the Global Voices Summit, and yet waiting the transcription of sessions 3 and 4 to the summit’s blog, “Language and translation” and “Technology tactics”, which where the most interesting for me, i have a bitter feeling.
GV‘s policy about translations goes through english. Or chinese. Even a kind of spanish edition exists, Voces Latinas, presence of that language, and others, are not being taken into consideration. Definitely, if someone wants to be on GV, it has to be in english and pass the filter
Speaker: why do you want to choose what to translate, why can’t I choose what to translate? Can’t the translations be ranked by other visitors?
Boris: the answer is a technical limitation; I can’t just turn that on. About motivation. We have to identify the value of translating, we have to find those values and appeal to them
While waiting the upload of the rest of the third session, where I hoope to find the answer to the question I made, I take Ethan’s summary where appears the comment on a pointing out that Global Voices currently translates only a small subset of the languages of the blogosphere – we translate content from Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, French, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Russian and occasionally Serbian and Ukranian. In other countries, we neccesarily misrepresent the local conversation, showing off only a few people in the country who happen to be bilingual. He points us to a recent blog post titled “Africa, Global Voices y el anglocentrismo cool”, which argues that if you don’t speak English, you don’t show up on global voices. David’s looking for ways to turn critique like this into involvement – what would be involved with getting the author of this post to help translate GV into Spanish and translate Spanish posts on GV?
By the last sentence, I think that may be the question was not understood, or may be they did not got it:
David starts outlining some of the questions we’re facing in dealing with translation on GV:
- How do we encourage blogger translation? How do we get more people doing this?
- Do we need permission from bloggers before we start translating their work?
- Should we translate non-English comments into English to encourage conversation?
- Should we let people translate all our posts, using the Indymedia model which allows people to click a tab, choose a language and offer their own translation?
I don’t know, I see a kind of strong editorial filter. With all that about We have to identify the value of translating and the issue about Should we translate non-English comments into English …
On the other hand, checking GV’s editors, everyone can see that, except two of them, nord-east Asia and Sub-saharan Africa, all of them write in english and/or they are anglosaxon (for example, Caucasus & Central Asia’s editor, comes from Oregon at the USA), and one very special to Pere: language editor for the Francophonie comes from the USA, lives at Brooklyn and writes in… english!! (Oh mon Dieu!!)
So, what does Global Voices?
Amplifies conversations from not-so-much-known blogspheres and helps that problems from anywhere outside the western world come to light?
Shows those problems only to the english blogsphere?
Anyway, at the moment, communication is only in one direction: other languages to english. And this does not match the Global Voices Manifesto:
We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.
To that end, we want to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.
(…)
We want to build bridges across the gulfs of culture and language that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We want to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.
This one direction communication, and the fact that first-world’s blogsphere (basically Europe and North America) is not reflected, brings three big issues:
Is there any feedback to the people that, for example, are writting in other languages and their posts appear in english at GV, translated or mentioned by third persons?
Initiatives from western world blogsphere, as an answer to some issue read at some round up of the sudanese blosphere, or any other initiative which could be interesting to some of the regions covered actually by GV, they rest unseen.
And the most important: people who does not understand english can not read about issues that could be interesting to them.
One possible solution would be the one that Stuart Henshall presents at his blog:
Offer translation opportunities to readers. There should be a button next to every post that enables any reader to offer up a translation. This translation would not be immediately verified. It would need to be vetted by others and voted on as correct. A link to the translator should be provided. It’s a perfect demonstration to their services and capability. If a translator translates many posts then their credibility should create a rating and capability. As posts become translated the “flags” should just be added to the posts.
This proposal comes with a little problem. Translations to minor languages, as catalan or myanmar, would take a long time to pass validation, there are not so many volunteers speaking this languages.
Then, should GV continue to use the centralized model? Or it sould open, adopting a distributed network model as the blogsphere itself, where anyone could tranlsate and, why not, editions of GV in other languages could appear spontaneously?
Issues about licences or if it is legal or ethically correct to translate posts without explicit permission from the authors should not be a problem if, instead of using restrictive Creative Commons licences, we all begin to use the public domain.
The problem is not what to translate, nor who has to do it, nor how to do it, nor if it is legal or ethical. The problem is that is not done yet.
We have the tools, and probably we have voluunteers also, and the offer to build those Voces Globales(es) and, why not, Veus Globals(ct), remains open. What is needed is… will to do it?
