Today I read that that debate gave birth to Lingua, that is, nothing more than GVO editions in other languages. A simple translation of the “relevant” contents of GVO in Bangla, Spanish, Farsi, Portuguese, French and Chinese.

The languages chosen reflect the momentum in their community of speakers. Any additional languages for which there is momentum will be added to Lingua. Lingua volunteer translators receive front page, top of the page credit for their work and can gain valuable exposure or build translator portfolios that way.

So GVO decides to follow the way of cool anglocentrism, with help from colaborationist translators, who prefers to translate foreign contents either than create new and local ones.

I’ve just seen that Uładzimer Katkoŭski, br23’s editor, died last friday on Prague, after being one year in coma after a car crash. He was only a year older than me.

The last post in the blog, written by his family, announces this very sad new.

GV’s policy about translations goes through english. Or chinese. Even a kind of spanish edition exists, Voces Latinas, presence of that language, and others, are not being taken into consideration. Definitely, if someone wants to be on GV, it has to be in english and pass the filter

Speaker: why do you want to choose what to translate, why can’t I choose what to translate? Can’t the translations be ranked by other visitors?

Boris: the answer is a technical limitation; I can’t just turn that on. About motivation. We have to identify the value of translating, we have to find those values and appeal to them

While waiting the upload of the rest of the third session, where I hoope to find the answer to the question I made, I take Ethan’s summary where appears the comment on David’s post

David points out that Global Voices currently translates only a small subset of the languages of the blogosphere - we translate content from Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, French, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Russian and occasionally Serbian and Ukranian. In other countries, we neccesarily misrepresent the local conversation, showing off only a few people in the country who happen to be bilingual. He points us to a recent blog post titled “Africa, Global Voices y el anglocentrismo cool”, which argues that if you don’t speak English, you don’t show up on global voices. David’s looking for ways to turn critique like this into involvement - what would be involved with getting the author of this post to help translate GV into Spanish and translate Spanish posts on GV?

By the last sentence, I think that may be the question was not understood, or may be they did not got it:

David starts outlining some of the questions we’re facing in dealing with translation on GV:
- How do we encourage blogger translation? How do we get more people doing this?
- Do we need permission from bloggers before we start translating their work?
- Should we translate non-English comments into English to encourage conversation?
- Should we let people translate all our posts, using the Indymedia model which allows people to click a tab, choose a language and offer their own translation?

I don’t know, I see a kind of strong editorial filter. With all that about We have to identify the value of translating and the issue about Should we translate non-English comments into English …

On the other hand, checking GV’s editors, everyone can see that, except two of them, nord-east Asia and Sub-saharan Africa, all of them write in english and/or they are anglosaxon (for example, Caucasus & Central Asia’s editor, comes from Oregon at the USA), and one very special to Pere: language editor for the Francophonie comes from the USA, lives at Brooklyn and writes in… english!! (Oh mon Dieu!!)

So, what does Global Voices?
Amplifies conversations from not-so-much-known blogspheres and helps that problems from anywhere outside the western world come to light?
Shows those problems only to the english blogsphere?

Anyway, at the moment, communication is only in one direction: other languages to english. And this does not match the Global Voices Manifesto:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we want to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

(…)

We want to build bridges across the gulfs of culture and language that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We want to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

This one direction communication, and the fact that first-world’s blogsphere (basically Europe and North America) is not reflected, brings three big issues:

Is there any feedback to the people that, for example, are writting in other languages and their posts appear in english at GV, translated or mentioned by third persons?

Initiatives from western world blogsphere, as an answer to some issue read at some round up of the sudanese blosphere, or any other initiative which could be interesting to some of the regions covered actually by GV, they rest unseen.

And the most important: people who does not understand english can not read about issues that could be interesting to them.

One possible solution would be the one that Stuart Henshall presents at his blog:

Offer translation opportunities to readers. There should be a button next to every post that enables any reader to offer up a translation. This translation would not be immediately verified. It would need to be vetted by others and voted on as correct. A link to the translator should be provided. It’s a perfect demonstration to their services and capability. If a translator translates many posts then their credibility should create a rating and capability. As posts become translated the “flags” should just be added to the posts.

This proposal comes with a little problem. Translations to minor languages, as catalan or myanmar, would take a long time to pass validation, there are not so many volunteers speaking this languages.

Then, should GV continue to use the centralized model? Or it sould open, adopting a distributed network model as the blogsphere itself, where anyone could tranlsate and, why not, editions of GV in other languages could appear spontaneously?

Issues about licences or if it is legal or ethically correct to translate posts without explicit permission from the authors should not be a problem if, instead of using restrictive Creative Commons licences, we all begin to use the public domain.

The problem is not what to translate, nor who has to do it, nor how to do it, nor if it is legal or ethical. The problem is that is not done yet.
We have the tools, and probably we have voluunteers also, and the offer to build those Voces Globales(es) and, why not, Veus Globals(ct), remains open. What is needed is… will to do it?

Her words say it is not being developed a parallel network, but the fact is that, after months of the debate on who must control the Internet, 110 million users, today, no longer depend of the resolution on names of the ICANN, but of the CNNIC, and have their own first level domains, at which the other users of the world we cannot accede.

While some criticized Google by ‘collaborationism’ with Chinese censorship, in this very same country, yesterday began what can get to be the sister network of the Internet. Is Google being today as evil as three days before? Where are all those posters and signs? Where are the preclear minds who while spoking of commercial sanctions, made possible this gigantic net split? Could be this split a demonstration of the impossibility to monopolize distributed networks? How will the US take this? Will this action open the doors to other countries or regions to make their own networks?

Many questions are opened, but a thing is very clear: the Chinese aggressiveness every day takes more run.

More than requesting some companies not being so bad, perhaps we must begin to compare prices of chinese dictionaries.

Ni-hao!

(via)

I put “companies” in bold because what a company searches for, is to make profit. It is easy to understand. Then it should be easy to understand that Google wants to participate in the enormous market that China offers. And who says Google, says Yahoo, Cosco, Mc. Donalds, Starbucks or La Baguetina Catalana.

What I find not so perfect, is that people does not make so much noise when Google, yes, the same mega-evil company, decided NOT to give the US government it’s information about users’ searches..

What happens? If one company decides not to allow some things about the Dalai Lama, Tibet, democracy, etc. is “evil“? What about countries who deals with China? Countries who provides fuel for the trucks which transfer chinese population into the “Tibet Autonomous Region”. Countries who are making deals with China, and who provides it huge amounts of money to pay those ‘political officers’ who seek and arrest dissidents and after torture and kill them. And what about those countries who practice torture and death penalty and/or permit its ‘law oficcers’ the ’shoot to kill’ policy? As for example…China, US, UK and so much other countries…

A company owes to its investors. But a countrie owes to a bigger thing: its citizens. Why nobody got out to the street with signs about “Tony Blair: don’t be evil!”? Saying Tony Blair, means any leader from any country that has commercial agreements with China, which are accomplice of China’s censorship.

What surprised me was reading about FON at places like Timbucktu Chronicles or My heart’s in Accra, where Zuckerman (now i see that he is a member of FON board) explains why sharing WiFi?s a cool technology for Africa.

The real problem is that there is not affordable broadband connection in Africa. And FON won’t bring it. What FON will do in Africa is to continue with the actual plot, in whererich whites give things to the poor blacks, but they don’t tell them how to do these things for themselves, signing them away for life.

For that reason i trust more in an ensemble of Starsight and Wireless Networking in the Developing World. I trust more in giving tools than giving built products.

For a moment, I propose to stop staring our belly, to raise the head and to watch around us. We have a great amount of population (although it does not seem, we are minority) that it does not have access to text books to learn to read. Millions of people who do not have access to free music, nor to any type of music. I speak of Africa, some regions of South America, Asia…

Somebody has thought about this people? Does it help showing the Nigerian children that RIAA and friends are a kind of vultures, if they do not have (nor they need) access to our music? Aside from demonstrating that to sharing is good, are there some initiatives to release text books (or e-books or whatever) with useful educative content for this people, so when they enetr The Network, either with green computer-toys, ultralight terminals or normal computers, they are with something more than the “Free Culture” from Lessig (I do not believe that it serves as too much a boy of the Ecuatorian forest)?

There are school books under the GFDL so that they can download them, print, bind and sell for themselves, and by the way, generate commercial activity from their own in these places? I do not speak to write books of its own history or culture from our western countries, but surely there are common subjects internationally that they would be possible to be grouped in free editions and that they would guarantee a minimum continuity once they enter the network and, by the way, to give the possibility of generating business with the creation of presses, cooperatives of booksellers, libraries…

What the developing countries need is commerce, not aid.

Some time ago, I developed a theory which more or less said that if the artificial intelligence acted this way, it was because they were programmed for humans and with human parameters. Of everybody is known that one of the faults of the human being is massacring what it interprets like a threat. Because of that Skynet, exactly after taking consciousness, states war to the humans in “Terminator”. And the same in “Matrix”.

But leaving sci-fi, we have the human beings (technophobes, neoludites, etc) who every day warn us about our lives being more and more controlled by machines and computers. And that if we do not halt it, it will not take long to arrive this apocalyptic future. And they are right. If we do not achieve in a fast way that public administrations and governments stop using privative software controlled by a mega-corp, this future might be real. Not so fatalistic as in the films, but it could step towards an abusive control.

At home, one can choose the software that wants, even though is always recommended the one that has more transparency and quality instead of the obscure, insecure which does not offer any clear control to the user about what it makes. The thing that is unforgivable, is that computers which contains data from citizens are at mercy of insecure software and the company that creates it, who knows what is really making this software.

Which control do the administrators of this data have if the software fails? What is this about depending on security patches that, when the mega-corp decides to make them, can be late months on to be able to apply? And if even the administrations of the governments do not have total control of the data of its citizens, which control may have the citizens about their own data? No one. And when citizens do not have any control about their data, and for so of their lives, the future where the machines under privative software of the mega-corps absolutely control the lives of the persons turns up.

Because of that the only viable solution is to put this data under the control of free and open source software. And that this software is made public. Software that any person with the necessary knowledge can read and know exactly what it makes and stops making. Software that allows the administrations themselves to develop it for their specific needs without depending on anybody. Software less prone to errors. Software that in case of error, the programmers of the administration can make the necessary solutions (and make public these patches) allowing more speed and citizen data less exposed…

The future has to be governed by free and of open source software.