Other bit of news: an article of mine appeared in the Japan Times on April 23 entitled “An Era of Translation by Everybody, for Everybody“, introducing a new easy-to-use translation platform developed by a team at the University of Tokyo entitled QREdit. (Pls read the article for more about that.)

Also finished a certain long piece of text about a certain amazing translation community, but I’ll write about that at a later date.

NHK World TV is expected to reach 110 million households in North America, Europe and the Middle East as well as areas in Africa and Asia by the end of March 2009, Yoshinori Imai, vice president of NHK, said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Here is the first paragraph of the text of the handout at the FCCJ webpage:

The world of news media is facing uncertain times, not only because of the emergence of new media using the untapped and unlimited potential of the Internet, but also because of the global economic meltdown. Competition among international broadcasters has intensified and media companies are under pressure to find new business. NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, has decided to meet that challenge with a plan to expand its broadcasting to the Asian continent and far beyond.

Now, this is all very interesting. I’ve said before that I would put my bets on NHK as the winner of the whole media shakeup in Japan, not only in terms of news but also in other areas of content distribution. According to an article in Variety, last summer first steps were already being taken toward this English-language site when NHK started offering content on Joost, a UK-based internet television service.

The thing that made me really wonder, being at the actual press conference, was when someone from NHK stated that this new English-language service would be broadcast on the Internet, but (at last for starts) not in Japan. That is to say, they will broadcast the service to foreign audiences only, on the Internet.

Isn’t that a bit odd? Why wouldn’t you broadcast your English-language service locally? What about all us English-speakers living here (like me!) who would love to watch such a service? Does that mean that they will track where an Internet user is viewing from and alter site content accordingly?

Maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding, but it strikes me as a strange thing to do. In any case though, I’m looking forward to seeing this when it does eventually come online here.

Here are a couple paragraphs from the first part of the translation by Adam (original in Japanese here and here), posted today:

No doubt WaiWai is something of a household name among many Néojaponisme readers. For those who missed the recent absence of sensational, sex-fueled articles on the Mainichi English website, however, WaiWai was the name of a now-defunct feature that published sleazy, often plainly false articles loosely translated from Japanese tabloids. For years a guilty pleasure to millions in the English-speaking world, the fun came to an end this spring when a firestorm of outrage over the content broke on Internet forums such as the popular 2-Channel, leading the Mainichi to take the articles down and apologize.

While anyone can find the superficial details of what happened to WaiWai on Wikipedia or the apology on Mainichi’s website, a discussion of the larger significance of this incident has been harder to find. And significant it was — this appears to be the first time backlash from Internet-based readers posed a real threat to the business of a major media institution: a development that, as Sasaki describes, could prove “the milestone that turns the relationship between the Internet and the mass media on its head.”

The follow-up (which I translated) should appear soon.

Note: See also the version of this article at Japan Today, which has many more comments.

Here are the first few paragraphs to get you started:

“Do you enjoy shooting videos of people’s misery?”

It was June 8 in Tokyo’s technology mecca, and the words of warning from a police officer fell on deaf ears. Armed with the latest in digital technology and lured by a morbid sense of curiosity, crowds of onlookers converged on to a blood-strewn intersection of Akihabara, amid firetrucks and ambulances, closing in to get a clear shot. Never before had so many eyes and ears shared in such a moment.

“It was really vivid,” one of those behind the cameras would later write in his blog, recalling the scene he had broadcasted to thousands just after 1pm that day. Only half an hour earlier, 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato, in one of the most sensational killing rampages in Japan’s recent history, had plowed a rented truck into busy shoppers along Akihabara’s pedestrian mall on Chuo-dori road. Stabbed with a combat knife in the ensuing rampage, many of those on the streets were in a critical state. “People right next to the camera were so badly wounded they were receiving resuscitation,” the blogger wrote. “There were towels to stop the bleeding all over the place.”

It was a scene the likes of which households across the country, tuning in to live coverage of the massacre, would never see. Broadcast without gatekeepers and shared across mobile networks, the images, video, and words that exploded onto the Japanese cyberspace on June 8 would become one of the most powerful examples to date of the country’s emerging net culture. Emergency workers survey the scene.Emergency workers survey the scene of the stabbing as onlookers watch. Photograph by Kawataso. For the lost generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings, technology had opened a window into the tragedy in Akihabara that went beyond portrayals in newspapers and on TV. If this window was the new face of media, it wasn’t pretty but it was very direct, and very real.

Among other things, I interviewed one of the two people who shot the video (Lyphard), freelance journalist Toshinao Sasaki and also blogger Akihito Kobayashi. It’s the only article of its kind (to my knowledge) on this issue in English.

Here’s the link again if you’d like to read the rest.

「テレビ局の最大の収入源であるＣＭ収入の減少ですね。最近ではスポンサーが、広告費をネットなどに、より多く投下する傾向があるからなんです。ネットはクリックした人数、いわゆる接触率を正確に計測できますし、直接商品も販売できるため、広告の効果が高いとされているんですよ」

“This is a loss in revenue from commercials, which is the greatest source of income for televisions stations. This is because recently, there has been trend toward sponsors investing more in advertising on the net. On the net, it is possible to accurately measure the so-called rate of contact, the number of people who clicked, and because you can sell products directly, the effects of advertising are regarded as high.

The article also mentions that recently, TV ads often have a note mentioning to viewers that if they would like to see more, they should check out the company’s website. Then they quote again from Isawaki about whether the TV stations will go bankrupt:

「つぶれてしまいそうなほど、深刻な経営危機にあるテレビ局は、地方局を含め、今のところないです。過去につぶれたテレビ局も、日本では１つもありません」

“At the present time, there are no television stations, including local broadcasting stations, that are in serious danger to the point of going bankrupt. There has never in the past been a single television station that has gone bankrupt in Japan.”

I’m not sure what to make of this news, not even sure how accurate it is, but based on the figures listed in the article things look pretty bad: Fuji television faces a 19.6% loss in profits compared with the period of April-June of this year, TBS a 48.2% drop over the same period, Asahi television a 10.1% drop, Nihon TV a 61.8% drop, and Tokyo Television a whopping 70% (!!) drop. Something’s brewing, alright…

Gryc introduces the session this way:

In a web of open content and collaboration, it is often assumed that simply setting your information “free” is all you need to promote it to the world. Often times — especially on an international level — this takes much more effort. Such was the discussion of the Open Content, Open Translation: Multilingual Solutions session of the Local Context, Global Commons lab.

His observations later in the article about the challenges of translation in an open distributed context are bang on:

User interfaces are a key challenge for effective translation. While open source packages like MediaWiki and Wordpress have support for multilingual interfaces or posts, the translation process itself requires more than just a dictionary and somewhere to type. Translators often use sites like Wikipedia or extensively search the web to understand the cultural contexts of certain sayings and metaphors. For example, how would you translate “It was raining cats and dogs” into Swahili — and more importantly, how would an African volunteer figure out that this is a metaphor for “heavy rain”?

This brings up a difficult problem in user interface design: How can sotware developers build user interfaces for translation that not only provide support for using dictionaries and typing text, but actually help search for the meanings of analogies, supported fonts, verb conjugations, and other language-specific features? For example, how would a translator converting an English text to Japanese know when to use a formal (polite) or informal verb conjugation, when the original writer never even had to consider such a choice? Luckily, tools like QRedit are already trying to solve the problem.

(QRedit, by the way, is a tool being developed in the lab of Kyo Kageura (under the title of the Shiitake Project), originally only for English-to-Japanese translation but now also usable in the J->E direction as well.)

For more of an overview of the iSummit, see the special coverage page at Global Voices, and the two articles I posted there: one a general recap, and the other a translation of a post by Shinya Ichinohe about the division between Japanese and English speaking participants at the summit. For those interested in the challenges of language and culture in organizing international events like iSummit, I strongly recommend having a read of Ichinohe-san’s perspective, which I found very insightful.

We (Leonard, Hanako and I) arrived at the conference hall early enough to catch all the presentations. First came the morning keynote addresses, by Heather Ford, Jimmy Wales, Joi Ito, and Mohamed Nanabhay. For the most part these presentations didn’t do much for me, and I didn’t take notes since they were being liveblogged elsewhere anyway. The streaming video of Jimmy Wales live from San Francisco on Second Life was actually the strangest part of the whole morning (I am not a huge fan of Second Life to begin with, wish it would just die like it did in Japan.)

The show that saved the morning track though was without question Mohamed’s talk about open content on Al Jazeera. It was refreshing in that Mohamed brought a lot of very concrete practical tips on how to approach organizations that traditionally would be hesitant about releasing content on an open license. He made an important point about language, noting that while someone like Richard Stallman can insist on words like “free” in “free culture”, in the world of business you need to go with what works. He mentioned the book “The Starfish and the Spider” as an example of how to introduce the idea of open content in a way that will appeal to people who are in business.

Next the talks were divided among a whole slew of different sessions. Leonard and I followed the Local Context, Global Commons track, first for an “Introductions and goal setting” session and then a more concrete session on “Publishing in the Commons“.

I gave a talk in the latter publishing session, which meant that I wasn’t terribly focused on following the other talks (thinking about what I was going to say in my talk instead). The exception though was a short presentation by Tony Curzon Price of Open Democracy. Tony sketched the process Open Democracy has gone through, from an orientation first toward producers and consumers of content, then toward activists, and finally to becoming a community of editors. He described an editor in this context as “someone who solicits information and brings the best out of authors”.

Interestingly, and I think strongly connected to the way that Global Voices contributors are approached initially, Tony mentioned that authors (bloggers or other content-creators), when contacted by email and asked “wouldn’t it be interesting to write something” about such-and-such, often respond positively and end up writing something for Open Democracy.

He described what OD does as “providing a platform for people to come in and edit,” with the central community being “a community of people who follow writers.” He emphasized that OD has decided to “forget about the users, forget about the user-generated content, forget about the activists, concentrate on that little bit of the process that we think we know how to do” — which is editing. This whole idea made me think a lot, since we’ve been thinking about doing a similar thing in Japan, except rather than a community of editors, using a community of translators. Will have to think about that some more, but definitely food for thought.

A few more keynote tracks followed the publishing on the commons session, but I didn’t really catch enough in any detail to give a full report. Johanna Blakley’s talk about “Fashion and the Commons” really got me thinking, but unfortunately I missed the first half and never really caught up. Anthony Falzone spoke about the concept of Fair Use, but that was really too far from my area of interest to strike much of a chord with me.

Tomorrow we will be doing our session on “Open Content, Open Translation“, which I am looking forward to despite the fact that I expect a low turnout. All-in-all, I have met many great people, and have gotten a lot out of the summit so far. I have my reservations, but I think I’ll save them until later, when I can look back over everything as a whole and reflect on what the whole “isummit experience” is really about.

The conflict that I see between much of open culture as a movement, and the global reality of linguistic/cultural/political/historic differences, is that in the former the challenge to “cultivating the commons” appears to be framed largely in terms of law and technology (leaving out the latter elements). This is dangerous for many reasons:

If, as Lessig puts it, humans engage through writing texts and remixing them, then societies engage through reading texts and translating them. At a global scale, culture is created, and has always been created, through the synergy of these processes and not through the exclusion of the former over the latter. To ignore translation in the transmission of culture – open or otherwise – is to subsume the world’s diversity in a unilingual monoculture of protocols, statistics, and consumption.

The examples that I cite in making the case for the difficulty of a genuine “open culture” are taken from the Japanese language:

Difficult as it may be for some to imagine, many of the base concepts typically taken for granted in the West, things like “society” and “individual”, “beauty” and even “existence”, as well as some of the most powerful political ideas, no less that of “freedom” itself, are actually recent imports into the Japanese language. Incorporated and transformed by generations of translators, it is no exaggeration to say that these words and the meanings they convey – so familiar in the language of “global communication” that they pass largely without comment – have guided Japan to becoming the place it is today.

The examples above are taken from “Modernization of Japanese Language” by Akira Yanabu, which I highly suggest for anybody interested in learning about the history of the Japanese language.

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!!!

Yukawa describes the reaction of users when the site was opened to comments:

再スタート後にウェブサイトにアクセスが殺到しシステムがダウンしました。神奈川新聞の予想をはるかに上回るアクセスが寄せられたのです。サイトの編集部もブログをやっているのですが、そこに寄せられたコメントを読んでみてください。激励や賞賛のコメントであふれています。わたしは今まで、これほど多くの激励の言葉が新聞に向けられたものを読んだことがありません。業界関係者として胸が熱くなるものがありました。編集部の女性マナジャーは、コメントを読んで涙したそうです。読者は新聞との対話を持ち望んでいたのだなと実感しました。

After restarting [the online site], there was a flood of [people] accessing the website and the system went down. There were far more people accessing the site than Kanagawa Shimbun had ever expected. The site editors were also [writing] blogs, please have a look and read the comments on those blogs. They are flooded with comments of encouragement and admiration. To this very day, I have never before read so many words of encouragement and admiration directed at a newspaper. As someone involved in the industry, this warmed my heart. The woman manager of the editing department apparently read the comments and started to cry. I felt keenly at that time the degree to which readers had had a desire to interact with newspapers.

With all the feelings of gloom surrounding the newspaper industry (and mainstream media in general), this kind of perspective is really needed.

Eyes on Tibet link:
US Covertly Funds Global Tibet Movement: German Daily (Friends of Tibet)