An article of mine about translation in Global Voices and Project Lingua, titled “Translation and Participatory Media: Experiences from Global Voices“, has been published online at Translation Journal. In the article I outline how translation and languages fit into the day-to-day operations of Global Voices, and also try to situate the function of translation in this context in relation to other types of translation. To my knowledge, this is the first academic paper on the crossover area between translation and participatory media, an area that I expect will become more and more important in the future.

One of the “breakthroughs” I had while writing this paper was that I finally managed to pin down, in some sense, why translation is so important in Global Voices, and yet in many ways so hidden away. Obviously translation is a major part of the project (many if not most leftblog posts incorporate translation in some form or other), but as I point out:

The task of Language Editors […] is to translate and contextualize blogs written in a particular language, the term “language” relating to the task only at a very general level. Similarly, Regional Editors perform translation when incorporating non-English language blogs in their coverage, but the translation component of their role is not often mentioned. The Global Voices Manifesto frames the goals of the project in terms of the right to free speech and the right of all voices to be heard, with language and translation again implicit.

Translation happens all over the place at Global Voices, and languages appear everywhere, but the project revolves on voices. In the paper I argue that although there are problems with this, in the end it is natural given the history of the project:

The place that translation occupies within Global Voices arises not by design, but through the history of events that brought the project to its current form. At the very start of the project, a group of regional editors was hired to introduce to a global audience the writing of bloggers in different regions of the world (specifically the non-Western world). It was hoped at the time that “bridgebloggers” (Zuckerman 2007), local bloggers who write about a particular region in English (hence forming a “bridge” with the wider world), would be sufficiently numerous to fulfill this role. More so than translation, also considered a critical issue at this early stage (MacKinnon 2005), the focus was as such on context: the historical and cultural background required to make a foreign (English-language) blog entry understandable to an outsider.

It was soon realized, however, that there were not nearly as many bridgebloggers as would be needed to make this kind of coverage work on its own. It was at this point that Global Voices, through funding from Reuters and other sponsors, began hiring translators to cover particular languages (”lingospheres”). The current organization, wherein there is overlapping coverage of regions and languages, was in this way born.

In the end, I argue that although there are problems with this situation, the focus on voices over other aspects is actually a strength of the project:

The current article has highlighted various problems related to this lack of emphasis on translation, and to the assumption of a context implicitly geared toward an English-speaking audience. It is nonetheless important to reiterate that Global Voices would not be the project it is if its focus was exclusively on translation. The core mission of shining a light on individual voices, more so than translation itself, is what draws people to the project. The goal as such should not be to become a platform for translation, but instead to act as a space within which translation, traditionally invisible in the news, takes on a new and more meaningful role in bridging global perspectives.

The other area where I managed to make progress was in nailing down where Global Voices and Lingua are “situated” in relation to other types of translation. I’ve known about projects like Cucumis, Worldwide Lexicon and dotSub for some time, but there are some major differences between these projects and translation in GV/Lingua. In the article I discussed similarities with two other areas of translation: news translation and fan translation. In the end I’ve found that translation in GV/Lingua has elements in common with all these areas, but is also different from each of them. (For more on the connection with news translation, see the great set of papers from the “Translation in Global News” conference at the University of Warwick in 2006. For the fan translation link, see this paper on anime subtitle translation.)

I wish I could write more about all this, but I’m hopping on a plane tomorrow morning. If you have time, please have a look at the full article, comments are very welcome!

Update (July 9): The article at Translation Journal has been translated into Italian!!!