Idea: Translating Citizen Journalism

I just had (what I think is) a really frikkin good idea. Of course, like all good ideas, there's probably someone already doing it... so please let me know if so. 

First, some pre-amble. Jacob just sent this link to me:

Ground Report: http://www.groundreport.com

It's a crowdsourced citizen journalism business that pays its reporters on the basis of how many people read their stories. It's also very well done - their incentive package seems to be adequate and their design is clean and useful. It's head and shoulders above  iReport, the other citizen reporting site that we've been tracking (I'm sure there are others... we haven't been tracking all that closely). 

It occurs to me that *maybe* there are tens of thousands of would-be reporters who speak/write uncommon languages... languages with small numbers of readers. And who, therefore, have little financial incentive to report. 

What if we used a system like the WorldWideLexicon (which I've been on about before) to do crowdsourced translations of these crowdsourced news reports? What if a brilliant writer who speaks Romansh can report to a global audience? Or Masalit speaking people living in refugee camps in Darfur can tell their stories (by cell phone) to someone who translates the audio file to English for American readers who have the political power to galvanize for stronger action by the US government? 

It seems that breaking this language barrier in the domain of news could be transformative? 

Right? Wrong? Already happening? 

Comments

[Christine Egger]

Ben, I love the idea. Don't know alot about this space, but two groups come to mind who may have some insights:

Global Voices Online:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/

Solana's Social Actions' profile, if you or Jacob (also a member) would like to use that forum for connecting with her:
http://my.socialactions.com/profile/SolanaLarsen

Librivox, one of the (if not THE) world's largest audio book publishing companies on a completely non-monetary model. 10,000+ volunteers making audio recordings of noncopyrighted material.

http://librivox.org/about-librivox/

Created by Hugh McGuire:
http://hughmcguire.net/

Christine Egger
Social Actions

[Christine Egger]

Still thinking... I'm appreciating the inspiration and motivation to brainstorm a bit more. We'd love to see serious multi-lingual accessibility to ALL of the actions that are scooped into the Social Actions API, so I'm all for sharing resources and strategies on how to make that happen.

A crowdsourced or micro-action approach might just do the trick. FYI Michael Furdyk at TakingITGlobal set up a volunteer-based translation system for their group (http://www.tigweb.org) and have a staff member assigned to managing all of that. Seems tough to take that to scale, but the volunteers involved in translating documents certainly benefit from that experience and involvement. Tough to quantify that, but it shouldn't be dismissed in the name of "seeking the most efficient system."

Software might do it for many of many/most languages. I just did a quick Google search for "wikistyle" and "translations" and found these two possibly-helpful resources:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/translation-and-multilingual-wordpress-plugins/

http://wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=Relevant+sites+and+resources#Web_based_collaborative_translation_systems_and_tools

** Actually, maybe the best strategy would be to combine the two: use software to do the heavy lifting, and solicit micro-volunteer for just the proofreading.**

Fun time to be working on these projects, isn't it? Thanks again for sparking some thinking...

Christine Egger
Social Actions

[Ben]

Interesting. Interesting. At present do you have content partners in other languages... for embedding your actions on non-English pages? And, is it of much value if the action is translated, but the destination pages are in English?

We have been working a bunch on getting this translation system down. I think we'll have something useful soon. We could definitely do a test with your actions.

Re: software translation: we've learned that it may actually be slower to do machine (software) translation prior to having a volunteer who speaks a language well, do a translation. It slows them down by a factor of 5. Although, you could certainly do it - without the proofreading step even... Would be easy with WorldWideLexicon.org. It's far from perfect, but i think it's readable enough. Will probably give readers a good laugh every now and then... but prob still worthwhile.

[Solana]

Hiya - thanks Christine for linking up. I happen to be at WeMedia conference right now with Ben's colleague Jacob.

Global Voices translators are building volunteer online translation communities in around 20 different languages these days:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/lingua/

Solana