The Future Of Media (continued)
In my original post on this topic I said, "please take my RSS feed". I meant it then and I mean it now. I want the content of this blog to go everywhere it can and be read by everyone that might be interested in it.
Today I got an email alerting me to some chinese translations of posts from this blog. Here's a screen shot of most of the translation of My Favorite Business Model:
Based on my email exchange, the people who did this were not aware of the rules I set up, but they followed them anyway. They gave me attribution and a link back. Well done!
Follow that link and you'll see that these translations are peer produced with attribution to the people who are doing the translations. That's a cool model for others to follow.
And I guess this is M Ward morning at the AVC blog.
It's great to see the initiative displayed by these Chinese bloggers. It would also be great to see Google incorporate its Language Tools translator program into its Google Reader and make the translation of blogs automatic. Google has all the pieces it just needs to wrap them together.
Imagine subscribing to RSS feeds from anywhere in the world in any language and having them automatically translated into English (or whatever language you choose).
Were this the case, you could have done a heck of a lot more research for your trip to Italy this past year without the language hurdles.
In my opinion, this type of auto translate is one of the final missing pieces to making the blogosphere a single place online. Your thoughts?
Posted by: Timothy Post | February 26, 2007 at 10:23 AM
very cool. I wonder though, is anything lost in translation?
Posted by: JL | February 26, 2007 at 12:02 PM
Translator and reader community on yeeyan helps to keep up the quality. It's an open/social translation platform with comment, rating, feedback, and learning.
Machine translation is probably fine if you just want to know what a foreign article is talking about. But it has a long way to produce correct and smooth translations, especially for east<->west languages.
Posted by: YeeDing | February 26, 2007 at 02:32 PM
Wow that is a really good site. I am surprised I haven't heard of it sooner. Great to finally be able to read some chinese articles! (must be awesome resource for Chinese readers). Somebody needs to make a global version of this site.
Posted by: kpak | March 01, 2007 at 12:16 PM
Hi, I am a co-founder of Yeeyan. Thanks for those nice words, Fred! Obviously, this post had been translated into Chinese too and we made a nice loop. :)
http://en.yeeyan.com/articles/view/thunder/446
kpak, The reason you haven't heard of it was that the English site, http://en.yeeyan.com, was just launched last weekend. And as you can see its content is still not as deep as the Chinese side. But we are working on it. And hopefully other bi-liguals, not restricted to Chinese-English, can join us to produce more English content.
About globalizing this site or model, the site’s infrastructure supports rapid localization. As a matter of fact, we localized the site from Chinese to English over a weekend. Well, I know the en site is still hairy and we will fix it. But really the problem is that our language capability is limited to Chinese and English right now. We'd love to speak with and share our experience with whoever shares our interest of breaking the language barrier, no matter you want to build your own system or ride on Yeeyan.
Posted by: Thunder | March 01, 2007 at 04:25 PM
I really love the site, it seems like a brand new place with good oppotunities. Personally I have been a blogger as well as a translator for an aircraft company, though my experience is limited and not matured, I still want to give a try in this new field, just to know some new friends will be good enough too.
Posted by: Justin | April 11, 2007 at 10:33 PM