Translating Social Media Meedan Out of Eden Walk MIT Knight Foundation
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Ed Bice, CEO of Meedan, and colleagues An Xiao Mina and Tom Trewinnard walked over 21,000 miles across various social media platforms to better understand how machine translation can improve cross-cultural understanding. They believe the future of translation includes more participatory platforms, machine-assisted curation of content, robust translator support tools, context-rich data schemas, and viewing translation as a new form of social interaction.
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Translating Social Media Meedan Out of Eden Walk MIT Knight Foundation
- 1. Translatedesk and Out Of Eden Walk 21,000 miles of social media Ed Bice @edbice CEO, Meedan with An Xiao Mina @anxiaostudio Tom Trewinnard @tom_el_rumi
- 2. Video
- 13. Where We’re Headed : More participatory platform : Machine-assisted curation : Robust translator support tools : Context-rich data schema : Translation as a new social gesture
- 14. All that connects me to you is a bunch of electronic devices. If humanity goes back to its primitive state, I would lose you forever. @naj0ooo1414 Translated from Arabic by @anas https://twitter.com/naj0ooo1414/statuses/398009418132238336 “
Editor's Notes
- Introduction to self, Ed Bice at Meedan. Been working on cross language technologies since 2006, here to talk about a project with…
- Paul Salopek and his team at Out of Eden Walk. Pulitzer-winning journalist, tracing 21,0000 miles path of human migration. Ethan brokered an introduction between Meedan and Paul and that introduction blossomed into a project to also follow Paul’s route and walk and around the world looking at social media along the way.
- Paul milestone format – began his journey is Ethiopia a year ago. And we joined him in middle of SA, worked with him on the past five milestones through Jordan and Israel
- We joined him in one of the most remote parts of the desert…
- More lively digital space, people connected through web and mobile netowrks
- Our work in this project is to capture and translate the digital messages published on the public network. The stories provide context for Paul’s walk are happening through these devices and are being sometimes captured onto public social media. Our work is to provide a lens into those conversations and those stories. We do that by curating and translating tweets like you see this. The process we use…
- … an initial aggregation of a geobounded, timebounded dataset using technologies provided by Todd Mostak and his colleagues at Map-D Here’s a screenshot from an aggregation.
- Translation and publishing workflow in the spirit of a scrappy low-budget effort, our engineers hacked an instance of Checkdesk software. Here you see Checkdesk which is our social media verification and publishing tool. Extended to allow users to translate based on curated tweets from Map-D dataset.
- We seek to curate a range of social media artifacts from the mundane to the political, from the funny to the poignant, from tourists posting in Spanish and Korean to locals posting in Arabic and Hebrew.
- I want to talk a bit more about why we’re doing this work and where we’re going. An example of the importance of what we’re doing, and the big picture. This is a page from a prominent Egyptian activist, the sister of Alaa, who is posting important and passionate content that’s completely inacessible to non Arabic speakers. The challenge of sm translation, it’s an important challenge. One that the Meedan team has been working on for many years
- Meedan’s team members has been involved in many of the notable translation efforts in the last X years.
- As we look ahead, future of crosslingual internet will be profoundly different. We’ll be working to build out a platform that’s going to enable access to and tools to generate crosslingual content on the internet.
- 1. Tweet from Saudi