How Do You Read Foreign Language Blogs?

Weblog and Community Of International Communications Activists
Blogalization
http://blogalization.org/
= must have
Online Resource
FREE

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Blogalization is a multilingual project in development, looking for collaborators - and multilingual translations of the pun on the word "globalization."

"If, as Ross Mayfield observes, "social capital" is "the ease in which people in a culture can form new associations," then global social capital depends on the ease in which people from different cultures can form new associations, new metacultures, and new perspectives on their own culture."

"The principle behind the "knowledge ecosystem" of Blogalization is simple: If I have access to information in languages A, B, and C, and you have access to information in languages C, D, we can share information we don't normally have access to by collaborating in language C."

"A recent post on http://linguablogs.fieldmethods.net by Weblog Central asked "How do you read foreign language blogs?"

"Machine-translation tools such as Google language tools http://www.google.com/ language_tools?hl=pt provide gisting, but how common is it to find bloggers linking to gisted posts in languages other than English?

The answer, I wrote back to the WC, is that I took the trouble to learn a few foreign languages, and know other people who have learned other ones."

"What I envision is a game of linguistic (http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/)"six degrees of separation" in which I, with my English, Portuguese, Arabic, and French, could read about memes propagated in Chinese from someone with, say, Chinese, French, and German, and pass on memes from Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese to English blog browsers.

I hope this post willl elicit a good volume of feedback on what in the way of community features and topics might make this project useful to a community of people interested in intercultural communications."

Go check it out.
http://blogalization.org

 

The Translator's Manifesto For Peace and Human Rights

Throughout history there have been two main forms of communication between peoples: translation and war. Interaction between these two forms is complex, but whereas war signals failure and the impossibility of dialogue, translation is an instrument which builds bridges between societies, cultures and religions. Far beyond the act of merely substituting the words of one language for those of another, translation is an essential tool for enhancing our understanding of others and transforming the achievements of our different cultures into the common heritage of all humanity.