in the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic

dominique — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:33:47 +0000

Further adventures in the global community…
I came across an essay by Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard called The Polyglot Internet in which he discusses the problems of machine translation (see previous post) and the danger of linguistic isolation on the internet. Despite the massive globalization of user generated content with more opportunity available to interact with people of your own culture there is less incentive to share across global barriers.
“This in turn may fulfill some of the predictions put forth by those who see the Internet acting as an echo-chamber for like-minded voices, not as a powerful tool to encourage interaction and understanding across barriers of nation, language and culture.”
I thought, wait a minute, so I couldn’t find Farsi (Persian) in Google Translator, I know they have Chinese. However it appears that unless you’re dealing with romance languages machine translation doesn’t cut it. A comparison of the English text provided on the site with the one Google Translate chugged out is, well, let’s just say it’s difficult. Zuckerman looks to peer generated translation. Peer generated is the Internet way…
Ahh, but there’s always music! The title of this post is the title of a CD I just picked up by Kasai AllStars, a group from the Congo who have a beautiful mishmosh of traditional instrumentation along with bizarrely distorted and amplified ones (due to amps constructed from abandoned car parts and such). It’s awesome. And who could resist a title like that?

Dominique Lowell » ugc

in the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic