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How’s your Anglophone reception?
Hollywood raises the bar on ethnic authenticity
Culture is a minefield. Tread carefully.
Five words that should be imported into English
The blogosphere across different hemispheres
What’s the meaning of green in Greenland?
Lost in Translation: Strange signs from abroad
When your translator is truly checked out…
Beware of Slippy: For Shanghai, Chinglish is no laughing matter
Lost in Translation: Verizon Wireless
How well do you know your target market?
Is Twitter ready to go global?
In India, Microsoft and Google go local in a big way
It’s Miller Time in North Korea
Global road warriors: learn to fit it all in one bag
In China: All atwitter about microblogging
Does Crowdsourcing have a Place in the Translation Industry?
The Era of Open Standards is here
Translation Tools Without Borders
Content Convergence: Come Together Write Now
Beijing’s Olympic Task: Serving Up Gold-Medal English
In China: All atwitter about microblogging
By Prisma News
Category:
Twitter may be capturing the lion’s share of media attention in the West, but in China, it’s a relative unknown and quite literally a has been.
Once upon a time, Twitter, along with native clones Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu, were the pioneers of micro-blogging in China. All that changed in 2009, when the four networks were either blocked or shut down by the Chinese government.
A new crop of micro-blogging services quickly filled the vacuum. Unlike their predecessors, these newcomers attempt to balance users’ desire to communicate quickly with the realities of Chinese government regulations regarding Internet content. For now, that, seems to be the magic formula.
Among China’s up and coming micro-blogging platforms, it’s Sina Weibo that reigns supreme, with some 40 million users, or 47% of the blogging population, according to China Daily. Taotao and Zuosa are reported to follow behind Weibo in popularity, although statistics are unavailable as of this writing.
Sina Weibo on the Web and mobile
Like Twitter, Sina Weibo allows for 140 characters per post. In Chinese, however, bloggers can pack much more content and meaning into those 140 characters than would be possible in English. (It begs the question whether Weibo and its kind are truly micro-blogging platforms.)
Regardless, it will be interesting to watch this trend develop over the coming months and years. Will marketers be able to harness these networks in order to reach China’s growing population of affluent Internet users? Time will tell.
For further reading:
- NYT: China’s Twitter Clones
- China Daily: Flutter over new Twitter
- Yahoo! News: China lawmakers test out microblogging
Does Crowdsourcing have a Place in the Translation Industry?
By Deb Kramasz
Category:
Crowdsourcing will work for translation needs only where it works for original authoring needs, because translation is essentially a writing or authoring activity in another language.
And where does crowdsourcing work for original authoring? For what document genres, if any, does it work? It may be useful for compiling the Internet’s funniest videos and a means for problem solving (technical research for tough R&D problems, grading method, patent examination), but what about original authoring?
Crowdsourcing has been successful for online open encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia.
Another possible authoring application may be in journalism, if you consider incident reports as a genre of collaborative authoring. Journalist Robert Niles, in his article “A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing” sees the value of crowdsourcing in incident reports. “True crowdsourcing involves online applications that enable the collection, analysis and publication of reader-contributed incident reports, in real time.”
The attempt at crowdsourcing for the translation of the professional networking site Linked In was a failure. Well, actually, it failed even before a point for translation crowdsourcing could be reached. It failed because a specific group (translators) was needed for the crowdsourced translation and this group was an unwilling one. Freelance translators were unwilling to work for free.
Beyond open encyclopedias and incident reports, I have yet to see examples of successful authoring or translation using crowdsourcing.
Sources:
Wired Magazine
“The Rise of Crowdsourcing”
By Jeff Howe
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=2&topic=crowds&topic_set=
“What Is Crowdsourcing?”
by Jennifer Alsever
http://www.bnet.com/2403-13241_23-52961.html
The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 30, 2009, 06:00 PM ET
“Duke Professor Uses ‘Crowdsourcing’ to Grade”
By Erica Hendry
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Duke-Professor-Uses/7538/
The Online Journalism Review
“A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing”
By Robert Niles
July 31, 2007
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070731niles/
The Era of Open Standards is here
Everyone is done talking about it and is now doing it. The era of open standards has arrived. A range of open standard formats for several data types exists: .tmx, .tbx, .srx, xml:tm, .XLIFF, DITA, and the list goes on.
Open standards are software that produces outputs that are interchangeable across all applications of its type. For example, terminology software outputs a file type that is interchangeable with any other open standard terminology software or application with a terminology component.
SDL has just launched Trados Studio 2009, an open platform for a translation management system. LISA has its open standards for file formats .tmx, .tbx, .srx, xml:tm among others.
The carrot is consistent word counts, interchangeability, and same treatment of translatable text. The word counts are the same across different vendors and software programs when software developers use the same rules. Users are no longer locked into one vendor or software program when the output can be taken to another company or used in a different application. Leveraging is maximized when translatable text is recognized by any open standard tool.
The only thing left to do is use the open standards and reap the benefits.