Meedan, a new website launched last month, will attempt to cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West by eliminating the language barrier, reports Wired. Meedan, which aptly means "gathering place" or "town hall" in Arabic, is a project of a five-person non-profit, funded with grants from large foundations (e.g., Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Cisco). Visitors to the site post stories and comments on featured news stories in English or Arabic, and their text is automatically translated into the other language. Translation "status" is always clear, and Meedan also publishes the full history of each translation to the public, similar to Wikipedia.

1. Arabic-English Translation Website Aims for
Peace
This article was originally published on the Acclaro blog.
Category: Websites, Technology
Meedan, a new website launched last month, will attempt to cultivate citizen
diplomacy between the Middle East and the West by eliminating the language barrier,
reports Wired.
Meedan, which aptly means "gathering place" or "town hall" in Arabic, is a project of a
five-person non-profit, funded with grants from large foundations (e.g., Ford,
MacArthur, Rockefeller, Cisco).
Visitors to the site post stories and comments on featured news stories in English or
Arabic, and their text is automatically translated into the other language. Translation
"status" is always clear, and Meedan also publishes the full history of each translation
to the public, similar to Wikipedia.
Though Meedan uses machine translation for the first pass, one of their 107 human
translators then steps in to fix and refine the translation — a step beyond services
provided by Google and Yahoo. The site has 12 editors who often act as moderators in
discussions.
The mission is certainly ambitious — cross-cultural understanding and tolerance
between the West and the Middle East — and the site does have a long way to go.
Like any online community, it will likely struggle with the challenges of moderating a
discussion forum that maintains respect for differences. And though the traffic
numbers are impressive, with about 500,000 visitors so far, the site has yet to go
viral.
Interesting note (via The Guardian): Meedan's translation technology partners include
DotSub, GeoCommons, MakerLab, Carrot Search, and Rylander Design, but the big
guns behind the project is IBM, which has given the non-profit some $3.2 million in
research and development support. And although IBM's system isn't open source,
Meedan's translation memory data of over three million words is officially available to
other translators.
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