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

And the first translation?

[Chas]

First post!

All I can think is...

[MaskedSlacker]

...what could possibly go wrong?

Re:All I can think is...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

How many different ways do you suppose there are to say "infidel"?

Re:All I can think is...

[flaming error]

My first reaction was that this was a great idea, to let disparate peoples meet and try to understand each other.

But now I see you're right - after meeting our teabaggers and treehuggers all they'll walk away with is that americans are generally barbaric assholes and ignorant wimps.

Re:All I can think is...

[Tetsujin]

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

How many different ways do you suppose there are to say "infidel"?

Derka derka, Mohammed Jihad!

Re:All I can think is...

[Opportunist]

My nipples are exploding with delight!

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?"....

Re:All I can think is...

[flaming error]

That's a beautiful idea.

Before taking it international, I recommend you cut your teeth on a more modest goal. You might start by introducing tolerance, respect and understanding among more geographically united people that already speak a common language, say, on the message boards of Yahoo or youTube.

My hovercraft is full of eels

[spun]

Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?

Re:My hovercraft is full of eels

[spun]

Drop your panties, Sir William, I can not wait until lunchtime!

Re:My hovercraft is full of eels

[Conchobair]

Sounds Hungarian to me... and dirty... so dirty, my nipples explode with delight!

This won't end well

[jandrese]

So we have a service designed from the start to attract internet trolls from one end and propaganda ministries from the other. What could possibly go wrong?

I like the concept, but the real world is going to interfere with the execution.

Re:This won't end well

[skelly33]

Agreed - it's idealism turned unrealism if you think you can take diametrically opposing views and plop them in front of a translation system to breed collaboration, open dialog, compassion, and understanding. I opened a political debate forum years ago with a similar hope: that opposing sides would find common ground through irrefutable factual analysis. While there are a handful of open-minded individuals out there who enjoy this concept, the majority are highly slanted, bull-headed, and offensive and want only to start a fight. I've maintained since then that the people most in need of revolutionary thinking are the ones who are completely unreachable thus making it a wasted effort. Good luck, but don't hold your breath.

Re:This won't end well

[vxice]

You could always just get to know an arab. They are all over the place. There is also lots of information on why there are cross cultural problems, its a thing called research.

Re:This won't end well

[hey!]

I wanted to see just how inadvisable something like this was. So I sent a whole passel of George Bush quotes through Google's English to Arabic translator, then took the translation and fed it back through the Arabic to English translator, looking for cases where the sense of the words might be disastrously mangled. Immediately, this example popped out:

The truth in this matter is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he was president of the United States and the world would be better off.

Now going back to the original text, what Bush actually said was ...

Oh.

Never mind.

Re:This won't end well

[PopeRatzo]

Now we can have new opportunities to start flame wars with previously inaccessible opponents...

Maybe if they're busy with flamewars, they won't be so anxious to start the real, shooting kind.

Also, now that you've been registered here at Slashdot for a whole month, has your user name and sig brought a lot of new members to your "third position" political party, or have most slashdotters already realized that "third position" are really just nazis without the cool uniforms?

Re:This won't end well

[NeoSkandranon]

The funny part about your statement is that it doesn't matter which way is which.

Re:This won't end well

[EdIII]

Also, now that you've been registered here at Slashdot for a whole month, has your user name and sig brought a lot of new members to your "third position" political party, or have most slashdotters already realized that "third position" are really just nazis without the cool uniforms?

Before anybody gets too trigger happy with the flamebait moderation on the poster I am replying to, you want might want to actually read some of the positions of the American3p.org:

If current demographic trends persist, European-Americans will become a minority in America in only a few decades time. The American Third Position will not allow this to happen.

Parents have a right to choose where and with whom their children are schooled, and neighborhoods have a right to make the decisions that will impact them.

Recognizing our people's right to safety, and respecting the sanctity of the rule of law, we will immediately deport all criminal and illegal aliens. We believe, too, that American citizenship should be exclusive and meaningful. As such, the American Third Position will end the practice of automatic birthright-citizenship for children of illegal aliens. To restore, with civility, the identity and culture of our homeland, we will provide incentives for recent, legal immigrants to return to their respective lands.

On the surface, the ideals and goals of the American3p.org seem quite attractive and reasonable. Read a little bit more and you can see that is just pretty wrapping around a core of Racial Purity and Supremacy.

It was the Nazi comment that made me want to click the link and read it, and it is a well deserved comment.

Keep that in mind when you moderate. I think the Nazi comment should be +5 informative in this case.

Re:How do you say "slashdotted" in Arabic?

[Animal Farm Pig]

not the article, but meedan.net

What's next?

[Yvan256]

Arabic numerals?

Babelfish?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they haven't read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" on the side effects of the Babelfish.

Good luck, though.

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

Ecological Ramifications

[flyneye]

It could be considered a "Green" site. The flames from the forum could heat several countries, thus saving the need for petrochemical or electric heating.

Good, if it's accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so maybe now Arabs will see what their leaders say in English to the Western press, which is completely different from what they say to their own people.

Arab leader in Arabic: "Kill all non-believers, destroy the Great Satan (USA) and the Little Satan (Israel)"

Arab leaders in English to the press: "We just want to live in peace and harmony"

Western press: "Arab leaders: just want to live in peace and harmony"

Re:Good, if it's accurate

[Brannon]

Completely absurd. In what ways have Americans told Arabs to surrender to their way of life?

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.

Re:Good, if it's accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

You are jocking right?

You do realize that AlQaedah leaders have university degrees and many have studied medicine and or trained in western countries. The anti US drive is so strong and gaining more momentum every year. Fundamentalism was being funded by oil producing countries fr like 50 yrs now and it became self sustaining. I assure you that fundamantalism and anti US movements related to Sunni Islam are still gaining momentum. Significant amounts of the Zakkat money (similar to donations but required by religion) goes to funding fundamentalist organizations that are the breeding ground for terrorist and extremest organizations.

Re:Good, if it's accurate

[majid_aldo]

who told you arab leaders are representative of arabs?

"all your base are belong to us"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see that phrase coming up a lot.

Quoting something about not quoting something?

[spun]

Randall can tell people off for overquoting Python, but you don't get to quote Randall telling people off for overquoting Python without looking like the exact kind of person Randall is making fun of.

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?

Translate and Die

[ittybad]

Death to those who translate the Quran

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.

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) ;)

This will work like the recent speach at UC Irvine

[HockeyPuck]

Unless there's a solid moderation system (like /., but then you could have moderators battling it out, which probably happens here, but I don't see it) you could end up with stuff like this.

Recently at UC Irvine the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, had been invited to campus to speakabout Israeli-U.S. relations, but his lecture before about 500 people at the Student Center was interrupted 10 times by students denouncing Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Earlier that day, UCI's Muslim Student Union had issued a statement condemning the decision to invite a "public figure who represents a state that continues to break international and humanitarian law ... ."

After the 10th interruption, the event deteriorated further as a large group of students walked out of the conference room to jeers - and, the protesters allege, threats - by Oren's supporters. Eight UCI students and three UC Riverside students were briefly detained in another room before being released, after Oren had finished his speech. A planned 30-minute question-and-answer session with Oren was scrapped.

(follow up article at the UC Register)

Re:I'm not sure the language barrier is the main o

[Chicken_Kickers]

Sure. But how many native English speakers speak Arabic? You are making the assumption that the translation site is for the benefit of the Arabs but have you considered that it is actually more for you Westerners. We non-Westerners (I'm a Malaysian Muslim) have had a lot of exposure to your Western culture, values and language. In Malaysia, English is a compulsory subject at school but we certainly did not learn it for your benefit. After more than 30 years of life, I have not found much to be gained from your Western values, culture and your vapid mindless "entertainment" that my people are so fond of aping. Maybe it is you Westerners who should take the effort to learn about other cultures to avoid being so easily mind controlled by your politician's xenophobic propaganda. P.s. to those of you who are making anti-Iran jokes: the Iranians speak Farsi, not Arabic, you dolt!

Re:I'm not sure the language barrier is the main o

[Trepidity]

Ah, but you put forth a good counterexample as to why familiarity will not necessarily breed understanding. Despite many years of contact with foreign cultures, you still have a xenophobic, nationalist view of them, in which you see the foreign values as degenerate and unworthy, in contrast to your own culture's quality values.

Re:How do you say...

[zippthorne]

We never utter the phrase, "There's no word for it in English." in English. When we find a culture that has a concept for which no word currently exists in Engilsh, we say, "well, what's your word for it." Then we hit their language with a sack of potatoes and run off with the word. Sometimes the assault is more violent than than that, sometimes the exchange is far too friendly to be described in polite company, but by hook or by crook, there is no concept which cannot be expressed in English. At least, not for any length of time.

Re:Just curious how does one say "Towel Head" in a

[Snarf You]

Towel is not a correct depiction of what they wear on ther heads, its more like a 'little sheet' wrapped around there heads.

Somehow I don't think they would enjoy being referred to as "little sheet heads" either.