Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

[George Weyman]

Hello translators,

I have just today posted some thinking we've been doing on how we could use translation to open up Twitter, and the relevance of this for what's going on in the Middle East right now.  Please take a look:

http://meedan.org/2012/03/translation-twitter-middle-east-arabic/

There are some questions at the bottom you might be interested to comment on as we think about how we could facilitate tweet translation:

• how would you represent a translated tweet? How would you represent the translator and the author in this tweet?
• how would you inform the original author of the translation?
• how would you help the author of the original tweet check the translation, and seek redress if not up to scratch?
• how would you mitigate against abuse by unscrupulous translators with an agenda?
• how would you translate hashtags?
• would you expect urls in translation?  how would you know that a url had been translated too?
• what incentives would you give translators for taking part?
• how would you represent the direction of translation in a tweet? (eg. English to Arabic or Arabic to English)
• who would you like to translate your tweets?

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
George

--
George Weyman  - Senior Program Officer, Meedan |
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