New English/Arabic Translation Site Hopes To Promote Citizen Diplomacy

Wired has mention of a new site that hopes to encourage a grassroots "citizen diplomacy" movement by combining English/Arabic translation software with a Facebook-style meeting place. "Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means 'gathering place' or 'town hall'; in Arabic. Think of it as a social network filled with people you don't know, but want to understand."

Comments

I'm not sure the language barrier is the main one

[Trepidity]

Among Arabic speakers who have access to the internet in the first place, the proportion who know at least basic English is quite high. There are plenty of barriers to understanding and agreement, but I'm not sure I would rate a literal inability to communicate as the main one.

Something similar to autotranslate in FFXI?

[Nadaka]

I used to play FFXI and found their system of guided translation to work reasonably well. Several times I was in Japanese parties, or had a Japanese in my party and we were capable of communicating about 80% of what we wanted to. It generally produced less garbled messages than I have seen from sites like babel fish, though that may have been affected by the limited topics of discussion in an MMO.

You have new followers!

[LostCluster]

Thanks for joining our site... you're now being followed by:

@CIA
@FBI
@DARPA
@OsamaBL

Re:Quoting something about not quoting something?

[treeves]

When your sig is a Python quote, you exclude yourself from eligibility to make pronouncements about when it is proper to chastize someone about making Python-quote-pronouncements. Wait, what?

Technically

[presidenteloco]

Such a paradoxical construction is called a quine, after the philosopher Willard Quine.
One of his examples:
"is not a sentence" is not a sentence.

Re:Good, if it's accurate

[twidarkling]

If you look past any prejudice, it's actually damned insightful. Remember the media blockage that was overcome by fucking TWITTER of all things? Being able to find the discrepancy between what you're told by your government and what your government is telling other countries is major.

Of course, the trick will be keeping the site from being blacklisted so hard that its servers implode.

Aready broken the barrier a long time ago:

[Hurricane78]

Just go an play some online games. Preferably RPGs. Then you automatically come into contact with people from all over the world.
Most of them speak English anyway. But often secondary languages like Spanish help too.
And after a while, you will have them in your instant messenger, and talk about life and things.
But I promise you, that it will be more interesting than talking to somebody on Slashdot. ^^

Oh, and by the way:
I wonder if you can already find someone with the name Achmet on that site, having his status set to (deceased) ;)

Re:Good, if it's accurate

[majid_aldo]

who told you arab leaders are representative of arabs?

Re:All I can think is...

[CrimsonAvenger]

Other than that, I can't think of anything that will go wrong with a productive exchange via Internet.

The keyword here being "productive".

I'm sure you have some way of guaranteeing that the exchange via Internet will be "productive", and not a lot of name-calling by both sides?

Note that what a Syrian might consider "productive" is likely to be quite different than what an Iranian would consider "productive", much less than an American would consider "productive".

And god help us all if the translation program has a few bugs - you say "Let's talk about the Peace March in Baghdad", he reads "May I fondle your left testicle?"....