This is how it works

We are looking for volunteers to help us translate the Global Voices posts into Russian, ru.globalvoicesonline.org, and manage the blog. Why would you do it? Briefly, to bring the global (blogal) conversations to Russian-speaking readers. To become a part of Global Voices community and be in touch with bloggers all over the world. And - I cannot say it better than Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices:

A few years ago, it was reasonably common for people in the developing world to blog in English because they had to assume their audience was an international one. But as more people come online, more people in developing nations are speaking to their friends and countrymen, and they’re often speaking in their mother tongues. These conversations aren’t for your benefit - you’d need more than translation to participate. You’d need context, explanations of what the conversation is about… and you’d need an invitation to participate in the dialog, a reason for your voice to be added to the debate.

We tried to address the plurality of languages at Global Voices by expanding our coverage to include translation of non-English blogs, a move that seems obvious in retrospect, but wasn’t part of our initial vision. We now have regular translations from Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Russian and Chinese, and less regular translations from Polish, Serbian, Swahili, Kurdish and other languages. Which is great if you read English, but not as helpful if you speak Mandarin and want to know what people are talking about in Tanzania.

A number of people in our community were worried about this problem, but Portnoy Zheng, a graduate student in Taiwan (now participating in the mandatory 18 months of military service required for all Taiwanese young men), took action - he began translating some GV posts into Chinese. Recruiting a team of other translators, the GV Chinese site now features a wealth of content from around the world. Senegalese reactions to Wade’s re-election, translated from French to English by Alice Backer and then into Chinese? Yeah, we got that.

The success of GVO Chinese inspired other parts of the GV community to start their own volunteer-based localizations of GV content. As of today, there are projects underway to make translations available in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, traditional and simplified Chinese. Coming next is Bangla, which is forcing folks within the GV community to download language and font packages for a script most of us didn’t know existed. (That’s because we’re idiots. Bangla, or Bengali, is spoken by 230 million speakers, making it one of the world’s most widely spoken languages.) Some of these sites have only one or two posts translated - others are quite robust, like the Spanish site, which maintains a version of the Global Voices daily digest, which I maintain is the best way to read our site.

So, if you are interested in participating, please comment or email me, leila @ neweurasia.net.  There are the posting guidelines on GV Wiki, there is an author email list, and a lot of translations to be done! You could start with translating the posts from the main GV page, translating the categories of posts, recruiting volunteers and arranging the technical side of the blog. (As I don't have much time at the moment, trying to keep up with the deadlines at the University and neweurasia work, I would be willing to hand over this project to an interested and dedicated volunteer).

GV's slogan is The world is talking. Are you listening? For volunteers in this project, I would say: The world is talking. Are you helping to listen?