Meedan.net: Trying to bridge the divide
With the Gaza conflict in full force, perhaps a site like Meedan is needed more than ever. Meedan.net is an Arab-English offering in beta that uses “advanced techonlogies to enable dialogue and the sharing of knowledge.”
According to Meedan, the project will “translate and index thousands of media articles every day and provide a platform for secure, cross-language, person-to-person online dialogue.”
More from the site: “[Meedan] is a digital gathering place for a linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse community of Arabic and English speaking Internet users.”
So what I gather is that Meedan is setting itself up as a portal of sorts for Arabic<->English translation of news articles with, maybe, a social networking option (?).
I quickly scanned the site. I’m still not exactly clear on the technology behind the service. I know just enough Egyptian Arabic to get myself into trouble. I’m not sure how a translation program would give back meaningful results from Arabic to English. Shoot, it’s hard for humans!:-)
But, anything that could help create dialogue and understanding is a winner in my book.
I’ve signed up for the beta test (note to Meedan, send a reply to let folks know you got their signup…or did my spam folder eat it?).