Takeaways:
Translation is different from localization. It's a 2 way street, all learn from each other.
Both are expensive.
Using your supporters/partners to translate
Seesmic and dotsub are tools
Are community mores culturally defined?
Attendees:
Phone access to sites, people are skipping the computer. How do we serve up our site in ways that can be accessed via phone? Especially important in developing countries where cell phones are sometimes the only technology people have.
Jim: What do you know about online culture outside of the US? What do Latin Americans, for example, who are very social over coffee, are they as social over the internet?
Jill: From my understanding online communication is huge in Latin America. Orkut in Brazil. Asia, lots on the cell phone.
Mark: in China, at least for electronics, there are online properties where engineers talk to each other.
Jill: Community side, b/c people don't have their own apt, their online virtual world is huge, that's their community (for young people).
Hannah: We have a lot of commenting and feedback esp from the Arab community. We built up a lot of subscribers via YouTube. Online voting gave us a huge amount of traffic. People sent people to our site to vote on their videos. But a lot of our people are actually immigrants in the US. Not all actually in Arab countries. When we launched on Mirror, our international hits went way up. Mirror is very popular internationally. It's like an iTunes. So the challenge is getting stuff out there; marketing w/o marketing money.
Jim: We found the same thing with our stuff. Spanish version of the tools used by Spanish teachers in the US.
Chelsea: surge of social activism online, Chinese immigrants, Olympics.
Hannah: Global Voices, lots of expats reporting back. global Voices is all about translating international blogs into English.
Jim: Similar issue on the other side, in China censoring of web content but also de facto censoring b/c all schools go through one ISP. Everything times out b/c the pipeline in is so small. Some countries charge more for international access. Our servers are all in the US, so that's a problem.
Mark: We have a service that puts content out on the edge, people in countries put in on their servers.
Jill: Language vs. culture question. 45% of our traffic is outside of the US, but it's mainly the English-speaking countries. In India, English is the default b/c so many dialects. So which languages would you go into? Which are you translating language vs. culture?
Jim: Latin America--they are happy if the translation was done for a different Latin American country, but don't like if it was done in US for all Spanish-speaking countries. Chinese is all one language, though the non-communist countries are different.
Torie: Different views of the US impact views. In China, people might be happy about the product from the US. In Latin America, it's insulting to hand them something from the US--they want it to be their own. It's not genuine localization, they have expertise as well, have to respect it.
Mark: Same with Japan.
Hannah to Jill: so you are thinking of getting your site into other languages?
Jill: yes, talking to Tech Soup, they get software out. Does it make more sense rather than making a mirror of our site, to partner with another site in the country, work with them on the issues that are pertinent to that country? Also we have a series of blogs, so we could have a blog in another language, maybe French in West Africa. Or create a mirror site, maybe use free community translation services. Upside is that all the robust content would be available.
Mark: we have customers who we recruited to do a lot of that stuff, they are passionate about it. Works better than having our employees do it. Translating technical content mostly, also other stuff. We find them via marketing, community people.
Hannah: we have a massive intern department b/c we're doing news translation all the time. lots of different feeds coming in all the time. They translate everything into English. They are unpaid. Factchecker checks it after them, but generally we trust our interns to have done a good job. Another program, paid staff does it.
Chelsea: we have interns writing content, editors serve as factcheckers. Most interns in the office, a couple distance, but that's more difficult.
Mark: Most of our translation is at a distance.
Jim: We send the English content to a country, they gather teachers to agree on what a localization of that content would be.
Hannah: We're thinking of doing a media literacy program in the US, but tech is a barrier. Is that a barrier elsewhere?
Jim: Yes, we're trying to make it so you can connect for some things but do a lot offline.
Torie: Key is localization, not just translation. What you do might be different in different countries. Maybe in one country, a direct translation is appropriate. In another, just one section of site.
Jill: That impacts the type of community you can build.
Jim: It's cultural and technical. Left to right language with a right to left interface.
Hannah: Seems like a place for partnering with someone in that country.
Jim: Last year we went to an online curriculum, one of the reqs was having filtering software for "naughty words". That was okay. But then in Arabic, huge problem. Too embarrassing to ask what the nasty words were.
Hannah: Interesting Arabic issues, even with a full Arabic team we make mistakes all the time. We had an interview with an Iranian Kurd. No one commented on the interview, they said "all Kurds are Iranian."
Mark: We have rowdy guys running one product, one word got in there, someone was ticked off.
Torie: Global community, what can the US site learn from the other sites? Not just handing out US info, but really learning from each other. What can you add to the US content from the Spanish site?
Hannah: video tools: seesmic, a video conversation website where if you are a user you can select your language when you sign up, can select multiple languages, it's all video convos. Also dotsub, allows subtitling in a variety of languages. community-created translation.
Page Last Updated: Jun 18 6:53pm by torie.gorges@sri.com