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US Government Seeks Open-Source Translation
valdean writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that last week the United States Government began publishing captured Iraqi documents on the web in order to harness the translating talents of the bilingual public. The article calls it 'the same open source principle' that created Linux. Check out the Foreign Military Studies Office's document portal."
I think it's a great idea, but how many people will have to translate a document with similar results before it can be trusted?
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What if it turns out that the document is talking about something that the US finds it needs to classify? Too late then...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I fail to see how the term 'open-source' is applicable to a translation. Is the belief that if a number of people contribute to something, that it's open-source?
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Anonymous Pissed Sunni"
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Saddam"
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Bin Laden"
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Iran"
I think I'm getting the hang of this translation stuff.
Table-ized A.I.
Why don't they put the NSA's crack team on ti, they seem to be good at this sort of thing. Or they couls hire translators? Maybe they are just trying to ferret out people who show too much interest in these documents?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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So "open source" is now anything that's a free/community project?
Do the Amish then have "open source" barn raisings?
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about doing, working for free for the US government ...
Just worked on one, got this: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP first, i must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. this is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'. i am sure and have confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of this great magnitude involving a pending transaction requiring maxiimum confidence. we are top official of the iraqi government contract review panel who are interested in imporation of goods into our country with funds which are presently trapped in fallujah. in order to commence this business we solicit your assistance to enable us transfer into your account the said trapped funds. the source of this fund is as follows; during the last military regime here in iraq, the government officials set up companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries. the present civilian government set up a contract review panel and we have identified a lot of inflated contract funds which are presently floating in the central bank of iraq ready for payment, some to halliburton, some to you.
I think they are forgetting that (for some deranged part of our society), creating Linux was fun. Will translating orders for toilet paper for the Iraqi National Guard mess hall be fun too? Only if you can write your translation as a perl poem!
David W. Hogg -- assoc prof, NYU Physics
Whew! You had me scared for a second.
Luckily, your expert usage of English grammer re-assures me.
Apparently they are only upset at one (unnamed) American who has multiple throats, and they wish to shove each of these up the asses of an (unnamed) third party that consists of more than one person. Or it could be that this particular individual's throats also have asses... which makes the action somewhat circular...
Well, I don't have multiple throats, so my neck must be out of danger... But my ass might be the target of their threat.
This is properly tantamount to a voluntary tax upon bilinguals
So, by your reasoning we should suspend activities such as:
- Big Brothers/Big Sisters
- Frats and VFW groups who do highway/litter cleanup
- Museum volunteers
- Reference desk volunteers at the local library
- Volunteers for the Red Cross and other relief orgs who are at least partially funded through tax dollars - but whose volunteers are not paid for their work
- Civics groups who put on things like Shakespeare in the Park
- Volunteer firefighters and EMTs
- College students who pay money to take their springbreak repairing the houses of dirt poor black americans in towns in the south where racism still lurks ominously. That is *double* taxation - not only have I paid to make the trip and buy the building materials, but I also spent weeks of my own time doing it. Why doesn't the gov't step in and pay me me! me!! to help these poverty-stricken people?
Maybe you got your degree from this guy so you don't understand that people who are paid by the gov't are paid out of your tax dollars. Very simple math. Gov't hires 10 more people, your taxes go to paying those ten extra people instead of whatever social program you fancy today. Give a little time as a volunteer (to do whatever, not nessecarily translate docs), and you save yourself a few dollars in taxes and get to have a little bit of civic pride. But it seems like you want us to all run around like a bunch of self-centered little dumbasses.
God forbid you should help an old lady cross the street without expecting a check for your "services".
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
" This whole story is odd. The American government has an annual budget exceeding $2.0 trillion [cia.gov], yet that same government cannot seem to buy top-notch translators graduating from the academic pentagon: Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Illinois (at Urbana-Champagne), and University of Wisconson (at Madison)?"
Yes. That is exactly the case. It isn't a matter of money. It's a matter of not enough people with the required skillset. The US government has had numerous open jobs looking for people with these skills for many years and they cannot fill them. This led to a lot of the Intel problems we had prior to Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I call, "BS", on this story. "
Why? Ignorance?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
I think you've missed the point. The government is not targeting insurgents, it is targeting people outside of Iraq, people who have access to the internet. Especially people in the US, so they can "see how bad the previous regime was".
I think many people project their status onto other, so if everyone you know has a computer and is connected to the internet, and just because you see insurgents advertising on the internet, does not mean that everyone has access to the internet. I've been to the Middle East (not Iraq), where the majority of people do not have computers let alone internet access.
However, you are correct, I call BS as well that they need the "public's" help to translate documents.
US Government doesn't give enough information to the public there US Government is bad.
US Government Gives Too Much information to the public there US Government is bad.
US Govermnet translates documents to skew them to their own meaning there US Government is bad.
US Government releases documents for the puclic to translate therefore US Government is bad.
Give me a fcking break.
And I won't even bother explaining the tons of goofy dialects that make translating Arabic from anywhere very difficult. You practically have to have a translator born in the neighborhood where the document was written. I took Arabis for a year and went nuts when learning every phrase went like: This is how the phrase is said in Saudi Arabis; this is how it is said in Egypt, this is how it is said in Kuwait, this is how it is said in this part of Bahrain... and so on.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power