IMPORTANT: Translating Social Media from Egypt's June 30

[Ed Bice]

Dear All, 

As some of you know we are busy working on the social media translation platform prototype - Translatedesk. 

We have had three meetings with Twitter to discuss the project and are hoping to have a functional prototype in the next few weeks. 

As some of you also know, there has been a fair amount of important AR social media circulating from Egypt over the past five days.!! :) Because this period of Egypt's history has not been so courteous as to wait for the release of the prototype, I am writing into this list - to our dear HOT/AUC Social Media Translation Workshop Group - with an ad-hoc recipe/suggestion for doing some (granted Twitter focused) translation.  

The recipe is very simple - and falls out from our work together. 

1. Log on to Twitter (sorry, this work around is going to require a Twitter account) 

2. If you find a Tweet in Arabic that you believe is deserving of a translation hit 'reply' to the tweet

3. In the reply field start with 'TT' space 

4. Begin and end your translation in quotation marks (eg TT "the current situation in Egypt is evolving minute to minute we...." 

5. Add @meedan to the end of the tweet (so that we can collate all of the translated tweets into the Meedan account and retweet all submissions from there). 

6. Include (but do not translate) the original hashtags from the tweet (know that this is optional, but considered a best practice)

7. If you run out of room (140 characters) use the formality of 1/2 ( meaning Tweet 1 of 2 - eg, (TT "the current situation in Egypt is evolving minute to minute we...." #Egypt @meedan 1/2)  at the end of the first tweet and then go back to number 3 above and hit reply and begin the next portion of the translation with: TT "...do not know how it will look tomorrow." 2/2 #Egypt @meedan 

We will hope that this allows us to model the potential for TT before the release of the prototype and will be anxious to see how this 'experiment' works. 

if you are looking for some interesting or contended Tweets to translate, you might want to look at the Tweets being curated into the AMAY liveblog here: http://liveblog.almasryalyoum.com or the Welad el Balad liveblog here: http://yomaty.net 

And, it goes without saying that we welcome any and all translated tweets - there are a diversity of opinions out there now and we want to share them all. 

Best wishes and warm salams to all 

Ed

PS - Fatima, Rania, Maha feel free to cross post this to the FB group. 

Ed Bice  |  CEO  Meedan  |  + 415 497 2900  |  @edbice  |  skype. edbice  |  http://meedan.org