8th International Conferenc & Exhibition on Language Transfer in Audiovisual Media
Berlin, October 6 – 8, 2010

http://www.languages-media.com/conference_programme_2010.php

Digitisation and the explosion in digital content, social media, cloud computing and new platforms offer growing opportunities for audiovisual production, distribution and localisation. These developments are flanked by diversifying concepts and modes of audiovisual translation (multidimensional translation, all forms of accessibility), consequently blurring distinctions and supposed dichotomies (professional versus amateur, productivity versus quality, subtitling versus dubbing, etc.).

Open resources, open markets and open societies are creating new distribution contexts but are also imposing new (working) constraints, which force us to question current training programmes and anticipate future ones.

The 8th International Languages and the Media Conference and Exhibition with its focus on language transfer in audiovisual media addresses these challenges with the following twelve themes:

THEMES

Global Content – Local Audiences / Global Audiences – Local Content: globalisation vs. glocalisation, global and local markets, multilingual access, internationalisation (English as lingua franca), consumer choice, supply and demand, power and ideology.

Broadcasting and Language Policy: programming, multilingual and multicultural settings, internet broadcasting, legislation, special interest channels, ethnic minorities, lesser-used languages.

Social Media: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikis and Co., Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, participatory culture.

Crowdsourcing: fansubbing, fandubbing, amateur translation and interpreting, activist networks, “natural” translators and interpreters, community translation, collective intelligence.

Technical Documentation and AV Localisation: corporate videos, corporate terminology, TMs, AVT and cloud computing, subtitling, voiceover, dubbing, interpreting, narration, reversioning.

Access and Live Entertainment: accessibility and social cohesion, audio description for the blind and the partially sighted, subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing, surtitles, audio subtitling, sign language interpreting, revoicing, museums, opera, theatre, religious settings, sports and other live events.

Games Localisation: interactive software, serious games, online and mobile gaming, dealing with linguistic assets.

Tools and Technologies: new software developments, 3D, translation memory systems and computer-assisted tools applied to AVT, machine translation, voice recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, virtual environments, digitisation, on-the-go technology, eye-tracking.

Productivity and Re-Usability: quantity vs. quality, revision, redubbing, resubtitling, costs, pivot languages, archiving, metadata, multiple platforms, distribution and exhibition, translators’ rights.

Translator Training: academic curricula, translators’ agency, skills and abilities, didactics, undergraduate and postgraduate, work placements/work experience.

Audiovisual Literacy: research dissemination, professional ethics, audiovisual genres and translation, audience profiling, reception approaches, multimodality.

Language Acquisition: foreign language learning and AVT, mother tongue literacy, lesser taught languages, reading skills.

Nelson Mandela’s personal archives include journals kept during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early 1960s; diaries and letters written in Robben Island and other South African prisons; notes from the post-apartheid transition; and speeches and correspondence written during his presidency.

The Chinese translation of the book will be a cooperation between China Citic Press and the collaborative translation project dongxi.net. Here you find the details explaining how to participate .

Yeeyan.org has 150,000 registered users, who collectively translate 50 to 100 news articles every day from English to Chinese. Since its inception in 2006, the site has grown into a key gateway for Chinese speakers who want to follow international news. It has been so successful that it has attracted the attention of major news sources like The Guardianand ReadWriteWeb — and also the Chinese government, which abruptly shut Yeeyan down last year for several months.

But this is not a story about China. I believe that Yeeyan is pioneering cost-effective solutions to a major global problem: the ghettoization of information by language. This is a change with potentially far-reaching implications for journalism. I met Kitty Wang, the vice general manager, and Walter Wang, Yeeyan’s community manager (no relation), in a Beijing cafe and asked them to explain to me how Yeeyan works, from technological, social, and business perspectives.

The name Yeeyan derives from the Chinese characters 译 (yi) and 言 (yan), which together mean something like “translate the information,” and Kitty and Walter told me that the site’s primary aim is to increase the flow of information between cultures. Yeeyan.org looks like a news site, with headlining photos and editor-selected hot stories on the front page. (English readers can check out the Google translation.) Stories are arranged into typical sections such as business, sports, technology, and life. The difference is that all of the Chinese-language material on the site has been translated from English sources by members of the Yeeyan community, almost always for free.

The success of the site in producing a continual stream of translations — over 60,000 so far — is the result of careful community management and well-designed social features. And it’s a model that seems like it could be replicated for other languages.

Putting the community to work

Aside from reading stories, users can perform two basic actions: recommend a story or a URL for translation, or translate a recommended story. All visitors to the site are readers, many are recommenders, and only a few thousand — a couple percent — actually create translations. That turns out to be enough, but Yeeyan’s existence depends on getting people to translate.

The site’s design encourages participation in a number of different ways. The front page prominently displays a staff-curated selection of recommended but as-yet-untranslated articles. Users can create “projects,” collections of articles around a specific topic, such as “foreign affairs,” “film lovers,” or “Toyota recall,” and active topics are featured on the front page. Each user has a profile which shows a history of their recommendations and completed translations, and a number of typical social networking features are supported, such as comments on articles and messages between users.

Yeeyan has also recently adopted a badge system, to encourage both participation and quality. There are automatically awarded badges for things like “most translations this week” and “most comments this week,” as well as a series of overall “levels” that users can attain by translating and commenting. Kitty says participation has shot up since the introduction of these incentives.

“Amazing ah?” says Kitty. “Even this little thing can intrigue passion.” As Napoleon once said, a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.

But clever software can never replace the involvement of human community managers. Yeeyan’s staff must read each translation before it is posted to ensure that it does not violate government taboos on reporting. (Since reopening in January, Yeeyan has dropped its “current events” category and now avoids all overtly political news, including stories from erstwhile partner The Guardian.) All websites in China are required to self-censor in this manner, but Yeeyan also takes this opportunity to interact with its translators.

“We are the first readers, so we comment first, we encourage users first, we proofread first,” says Kitty. “Those are all important to build up [the] community phenomenon.”

Participation over quality

Kitty told me that there had been much early discussion over whether the site should publish only “good” translations, but in the end they decided that “the gate should be opened to everyone.” Part of their strategy is to encourage readers to become translators. Beginning translators tend to produce rough texts and make many mistakes, says Kitty, but “it is cruel if we don’t even provide a chance.” The policy occasionally drives good translators away from the site, but the Yeeyan team sees translator training as an important part of their social mission.

Nonetheless, Yeeyan has recently debuted a proofreading feature. The original text and a user translation are displayed side by side, and the proofreader can comment on each paragraph. Participation is encouraged by awarding badges for proofreading.

Copyright and the business

Under international law, permission from the copyright holder is generally required to create or publish a translation. By publishing user-supplied translations of arbitrary news material, Yeeyan creates a public good in a legally dubious fashion. But it’s worth remembering that many of the vital information services we now take for granted began on similarly vague principles. The web search engine could not exist without wholesale duplication of the entire web onto local servers, a move which was by no means obviously legal when the first commercial search engines appeared — and which some news organizations still aren’t sure about. The legality of Google scanning books is similarly being challenged.

Even so, Yeeyan is actively seeking agreements with copyright holders to create and publish translations of their work. “We do not want to use content for business illegally, but how to get authorization is a big problem,” Kitty said. “That’s why we are trying to talk to [copyright holders] to have win-win-win business model.”

The three parties in “win-win-win” are the content producer, Yeeyan, and the translator. Yeeyan has just such an agreement with ReadWriteWeb. All RWW articles are translated by a paid freelancer and posted on rwwchina.com, with the ad revenue split between Yeeyan and RWW.

Yeeyan is reluctant to put too much advertising on the main site, both because of the legal questions raised by commercial use of translations and for fear of alienating its all-volunteer community. But there’s money to be made offline if you have access to a huge pool of translation talent, and connections to publishers on both sides of the language divide. Yeeyan hopes to make its money out of brokering translations for foreign firms eager to enter the Chinese market, both online and offline. The company already handles the Chinese language versions of Men’s Health and several other magazines and has brokered more than 20 book deals. Translators are drawn from the best of Yeeyan’s volunteer talent pool. As an incentive to reach professional proficiency, translators who have earned the “Level 4″ badge can apply to be Yeeyan partners. If approved, these skilled translators get the “Partner” badge, plus 3 RMB for every 1,000 views of their translated articles — and possibly a translation job offer later.

Journalism in an era of cheap translation

Yeeyan’s success raises broader questions for journalists and journalism. First, could the model be replicated? Could, say, the Associated Press cultivate a community that actively translated their reporting into other languages? I don’t see why not, though any organization that tried this would need a deep understanding of “community” and everything that implies — and deliver such an obvious public good that thousands of people would be willing to volunteer their time. The business model might also be different, but I can think of a number of ways to monetize a pool of translators and an audience eager for foreign-language news.

But suppose that a news organization was able to deliver a substantial amount of content to foreign-language audiences for very little cost, through communities like Yeeyan, or machine translation, or a combination of the two as in the hybrid World Wide Lexicon project. Such translations would not be up to professional quality initially — if ever — and publishers may be hesitant to endorse error-prone representations of their work. But asking about absolute accuracy and brand dilution misses the point — it’s like critiquing Wikipedia for its (improving) accuracy without discussing the net benefit to humanity. How would cheap translation change foreign reporting, and the very concept of international news? It’s a question which will soon be forced upon the profession by rising technological tides.

]]> http://yingeli.net/en/2010/06/english-the-wikipedia-of-news-translation-yeeyan-org%e2%80%99s-volunteer-community/feed/ 0 http://yingeli.net/en/2010/06/english-d-lib-magazine-digital-libraries-in-china/ http://yingeli.net/en/2010/06/english-d-lib-magazine-digital-libraries-in-china/#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:15:42 +0000 yingeli http://yingeli.net/en/?p=948 Source: www.dlib.org/dlib/may10/05editorial.html

The current issue is devoted to the topic of digital library efforts in China. With the help of Sam Sun, long-time CNRI employee and Beijing native, we have gathered a group of authors who speak authoritatively on current projects in China. Four of those articles, primarily describing current and past projects from a non-technical perspective, appear in this issue while some of the more technical articles will appear in issues later this year.

Many D-Lib readers will be unaware of the activities in China, which are extensive and growing. If you read only one article in this issue, it should be the Overview article by Xihui Zhen, which I think most readers will find of great interest. Just as China is assuming a larger and more important role on the world stage, so too it seems to me will they assume a larger and more important role in the digital library world as time goes on. The size of the various projects, the number of universities and research groups in China addressing the issues, and the vast sweep of Chinese history and culture that remains to be digitized and integrated into the world of digital libraries would seem to guarantee that.

Significant language, culture, and political gaps between China and the more established digital library players in Western countries remain, of course, and will present challenges on all sides for years to come. The language gap will even be evident in the current issue of D-Lib, as all of the articles started out in Chinese or in English written by native Chinese speakers. But as the connections between China and the other countries of the world deepen, these gaps will narrow and, in our small slice of the world’s intellectual activity, D-Lib will do its best to help that process.

Social Media: 社会媒体 shèhuì méitǐ; 社交媒体 shèjiāo méitǐ; 社会化媒体 shèhuìhuàméitǐ; 社媒 shèméi

Blog: 博客 bókè

To blog:  写博客 xiě bókè (lit. “to write a blog” – the noun “blog” in Chinese does not double as a verb).

Blogosphere: 博客圈 bókèquān

Blogger: 博主 bózhǔ; 博客写手 bókè xiěshǒu

Social gaming: 社会游戏 shèhuì yóuxì; 社交游戏 shèjiāo yóuxì

To visit: 访问 fǎngwèn

To register / to sign up: 注册 zhùcè

To sign in: 登录 dēnglù

Online shopping: 网上购物 wǎngshàng gòuwù

Podcast: 播客 bōkè (careful with the tones!)

Microblog: 微博 wēibó

SNS (Social network site): 社区网站 shèqūwǎngzhàn,

To embed: 嵌入 qiànrù

To upload: 上传 shàngchuán

To download: 下载  xiàzài

Hitcount: 点击量 diǎnjīliàng

Photo-sharing site: 相片分享网站 xiàngpiàn fēnxiǎng wǎngzhàn

Video-sharing site: 视频分享网站 shìpín fēnxiǎng wǎngzhàn

Streaming video: 流视频 liú shìpín

Video blog: 视频博客 shìpín bókè

Viral video: 病毒视频 bìngdú shìpín

Video clip: 视频 shìpín

Forum: BBS

Social media marketing: 社会化媒体营销 shèhuìhuà méitǐ yíngxiāo

Crowd sourcing: 众包 zhòngbāo

API (Application Programming Interface): 应用编程接口 yìngyòng biānchéng jiēkǒu

Location-based service: 定位服务 dìngwèi fúwù

Augmented reality: 现实增强 xiànshí zēngqiáng

Desktop client: 桌面客户端 zhuōmiàn kèhùduān

Mobile phone client: 手机客户端 shǒujī kèhùduān

App (iPhone etc.): 应用程序 yīngyòng chéngxù

Interface: 界面 jièmiàn

Search engine: 搜索引擎 sōusuǒ yǐnqíng

Search engine optimization (SEO): 搜索引擎优化 sōusuǒ yǐnqíng yōuhuà; 搜索优化 sōusuǒ yōuhuà

Firewall: 防火墙 fánghuǒqiáng

VPN (Virtual private network): 虚拟个人网络 xūnǐ gèrén wǎngluò

Proxy server: 代理服务器 dàilǐ fúwùqì

Guest post: 来宾/客座博客文章 láibīn/kèzuò bókè wénzhāng

Paywall: 收费墙 shōufèi qiáng

Real-name: 实名 shímíng

RSS: 订阅 dìngyuè

RSS reader: RSS阅读器

Browser: 浏览器 liúlǎnqì

Viral marketing: 病毒式营销 bìngdúshì yíngxiāo

Censorship: 审查 shěnchá

Chatroom: 聊天室 liáotiānshì

New media: 新媒体 xīnméitǐ

This collection is based on work of Hu Yong and students.

The “new words”: http://yingeli.net/zh/2010/02/english-chinglist/