looking for mixed-language e-participation intiatives
From:
Steven Clift
Date:
2007 Mar 05 17:06 UTC
Short link
While not a consultation, this listserv has used auto-translation
(they run a script to sneak their stuff through Altavista's
Babelfish) for years. At the beginning they auto-translated to an
editor who cleaned up the the posts and sent them in out in four main
languages used in Latin America - Spanish, Portuguese, French, and
English.
See:
http://funredes.org/mistica/
More:
http://funredes.org/mistica/castellano/emec/produccion/memoria12/0130.
html
Also, in 1996-8 the Junior Summit - http://www.jrsummit.net - hosted
by MIT used auto/manual translation tools with young people
supporting six languages. The top-level reports were translated
manually and the discussions work just fine with the young people
learning to avoid slang in order for others to get the gist.
In general, resistance to auto-translation in conversation - even in
experiments - is very unfortunate. I have yet to hear about an
experiment that was a complete failure and people refuse to
communicate. However, I only know of these two experiments.
In both projects, folks choose their preferred language and are sent
that version on top with the original just below in an e-mail.
If I had the funding, I'd add such a feature to groups.dowire.org
since it is database driven.
Cheers,
Steven Clift
http://dowire.org
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