China Digital Times has launched a participatory Web 2.0 initiative: the “Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon,” (“GMH Lexicon”), an online glossary of translations of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. The Lexicon has been posted on China Digital Space, CDT’s new, collaborative wiki site.

The “Grass Mud Horse” phenomenon has been awarded a Special Mention at Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category in 2009.

Source: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/12/introducing-the-grass-mud-horse-lexicon/

This project is part of our effort to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Internet’s cultural, social, and political impact by moving beyond anecdotal evidence and systematically documenting and interpreting political discourse created by Chinese netizens. By creating this lexicon, we hope to map out the dynamics of “domination and resistance” in Chinese communication and information networks. The aim is to vividly illustrate the increasingly dynamic and sometimes surprising presence of an alternative political discourse: images, frames, metaphors and narratives that have been generated from Internet memes. This “resistance discourse” steadily undermines the values and ideology that reproduce compliance with the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian regime, and, as such, force an opening for free expression and civil society in China.

Ultimately, we hope this project will contribute to the ongoing debate: Is the Internet acting as a “safety valve” to prolong the life of the Chinese authoritarian regime; or are new forms of networked communication enhancing opportunities for social change and helping to move China toward the “threshold” for political transformation?

Origins of the Grass-Mud Horse

In early 2009, a creature named the “Grass-Mud Horse” appeared in an  online video which became animmediate viral hit. The term grass-mud horse, which sounds nearly the same in Chinese as “f*** your mother” (cáo nǐ mā), was originally created as a way to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content. After netizens created an online video depicting the grass-mud horse at war with and eventually defeating the river crab, a homonym for “harmony,” a propaganda catchword, the idea caught fire instantly and the symbolic meaning of this term has been completely transformed. Within weeks, the “grass-mud horse” became the de facto mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos and videos, artwork, lines of clothing, and more. As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse (草泥马) represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and “ the Song of the Grass-Mud Horse” has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression”

The grass-mud horse was particularly suited to the contested space of the Chinese Internet. The government’s pervasive and intrusive censorship system has generated equally massive resentmentamong Chinese netizens. As a result, new forms of social resistance and demands for greater freedom of information and expression are often expressed in coded language and implicit metaphors, which allow them to avoid outright censorship. The Internet has became a quasi-public space where the CCP’s dominance is being constantly exposed, ridiculed, and criticized, often in the form of political satire,jokes, videos, songs, popular poetry, jingles, fiction, Sci-Fi, code words, mockery, andeuphemisms.

In recent years, Chinese netizens have shown they possess boundless creativity and ingenuity in finding such ways to express themselves despite stifling government restrictions on online speech. To the uninitiated, even those who can read Chinese, their coded language can be confounding. But to Chinese Internet users, the terms often resonate deeply by expressing feelings about shared experiences that millions of people can immediately relate to. Despite their subversive beginnings, many of the terms have already become mainstream in Chinese society; a few were even added to the Oxford Chinese dictionary this year.

How have these Terms Been Submitted and Selected?

The terms in our lexicon are all created by netizens and circulated on websites inside China, not just byprominent bloggers or opinion leaders. For many of the terms, one cannot identify the original author or how exactly it originated. China Digital Times selected these terms from a variety of sources. We discovered many from a self-initiated online project of Chinese bloggers to select for the “words of the year in Chinese blogosphere.” Others come from countless online articles, blog posts, articles from mainstream publications such as Southern Metropolis Daily or even Xinhua, and from Chinese BBS. The direct participation of Chinese netizens also yielded many terms after China Digital Times’s Chinese version made the call for submissions public in June 2010.

The selected terms are not a complete recording of pop culture online terminology. Rather, China Digital Times editors have focused exclusively on politically-charged terms which represent the netizens’ “resistance discourse.” These are not “censored” keywords, which have been documented elsewhere by CDT and other projects, nor are they part of the “legitimizing discourse,” used by people who actively defend and support government policy, including nationalists. At times, some of these words may be put on individual websites’ “sensitive lists” or outright blocked, but in general they are popular daily lingo for Chinese netizens.

The current list, chosen by China Digital Times editors, is by no means exhaustive and new words are being created daily. But we hope this list will provide a glimpse into online political discourse and make it more accessible to non-Chinese readers.

Help Us Build the Lexicon

This is an ongoing open source collaborative translation program with submissions from volunteers and professional translators. What is currently published is just a seed that we hope to expand upon in coming months and years. If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the GMH Lexicon editors at chinadigitalspace [at] gmail [dot] com.

China Digital Times would like to express deep gratitude for the extraordinary work of our primary translator, who wishes to remain anonymous.

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.

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