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Barbara Lindsey

Microsoft, Google eye Arabic web growth potential | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...idUSTRE63N0V120100424

google microsoft Arabic content

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Sep 10 - Cached
  • "One of our biggest missions is to enable Arabic users to find the right tools to enrich Arabic content," Ghonim said. "It would be great to see more e-commerce in the region, more publishers, more news sites. We are committed to help them."
  • Ghonim said Arabic speakers have historically engaged in poorly organized and difficult to archive forums, citing a message board used by 400,000 teachers in Saudi Arabia.Both Google and Microsoft place Arabic in their top ten languages in need of prioritized attention.
  • "The next few million Egyptian internet users will be people who don't really speak English," Ghonim said.
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  • "Think of the guy running a very small one-stop shop in (Nile delta industrial city) Mahalla," Ghonim said. "You should facilitate for him a complete experience in Arabic, from the way he registers his domain to finding a hosting company to communicating to his customers."
  • Mundie said the Arab world was well-placed to skip PC-dominated use and go straight to mobile internet.
Barbara Lindsey

Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace | Epicenter | Wir... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...arabic-english-diplomacy

cross-cultural community translation online

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
  • People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
  • Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
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  • The site is effectively bilingual, thanks to machine translations, and volunteer editors spruce up the translations afterward. Machine translation is quite good, Weyman says, on fairly standard text such as news stories, but still has difficulties handling comments, which tend to use more conversational language. The site also open-sources all its translation data to help the state of the art of translation to move forward.
  • “let someone in Nebraska see an event through the eyes of someone in Nablus.”
  • For instance, Meedan partnered with the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted an online webcast with U.S. Ambassador Christoper Hill last Wednesday. The webcast allowed Iraqis and others from the Middle East to ask questions in Arabic, have them translated immediately and get answers back in just seconds.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10
     
    A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic - and vice versa - will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Barbara Lindsey

Get Arabic and English News Perspectives on Meedan.net « Moving at the Speed ... - 0 views

www.speedofcreativity.org/...ews-perspectives-on-meedan-net

arabic english news fryer global

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Jun 10
     
    The Global Education Collaborative
Inas Ayyoub

Aswaat Arabiyya - 1 views

www.laits.utexas.edu/aswaat

shared by Inas Ayyoub on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Inas Ayyoub on 15 Feb 10
     
    good for listening exercises
  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
     
    Are these good for all levels of Arabic language learners?
Barbara Lindsey

danah boyd | apophenia » "Real Names" Policies Are an Abuse of Power - 0 views

www.zephoria.org/...real-names.html

onlinerights onlineprivacy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. T
  • what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.
  • privileged people
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  • If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.
  • Likewise, the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalized people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation.
  • The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online.
  • There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.
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