Serendipity35

"When the world starts to move from a primarily vertical value-creation model to an increasing horizontal creation model, it doesn’t affect just how business gets done. It affects everything. - Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat, p.201

from Breughel's Tower of Babel

As told in the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a built to reach the heavens by a united humanity. God saw this as rather arrogant and so confuses the previously uniform language of humanity with many languages, thereby preventing any such future attempts at tower building.

Serendipity35 doesn't cover the world of religion, but I'll say that I don't see the Tower's destruction as a particularly good move for the welfare of humanity.

So, I'm happy to see a movement like that at Google where many of its products, like Blogger and Google Earth, support more than 170 languages. Being that I was brought up in a much rounder world, I don't even recognize many on the list from Afrikaans to Zulu as even being languages.

Most of these translations are done by volunteers from around the world who are eager to help people view and search the web in their own native language.

Google created a volunteer translation program called Google In Your Language and people can sign up as a volunteer translator by visiting the Language Tools page and then clicking on the link for Google in Your Language.

Translators need to be verified and then are offered the opportunity to translate their main search site, Gmail, iGoogle, Google Maps and others

According to Google's blog, it usually takes weeks for an individual volunteer to finish translating one site. They need a good percentage of pages translated in a given language to put that language into production.

These "volunteer" languages range from Armenian, Estonian, and Slovenian which are 95% complete, to Latin (70%) to some that after several years of translation are still not production-ready. Abhazian, Tibetan, Inupak, Inuktikut, Wolof, Zhuang are all have less than 10% of their content translated.

Is that based on the number of speakers? Not really. All of that latter group has more speakers than Faroese, which has 74% of texts translated.

The Google In Your Language program is continually adding languages - most recently Navajo, Filipino, several Russian Federation languages (Avaric, Chechen, Chuvash, Komi), and some African languages (Akan, Bambara, Gikuyu, Kongo, Ndebele, Ndongo, Nyanja, Venda).

I wonder if any language teachers or student groups out there have explored Google's non-English sites, or, even better, have enlisted their students in the process of translation.

Obviously, by crowdsourcing this work with volunteers Google benefits in its business by increased usage. And yet, it still feels like a good thing all around to me. Making Net resources available to more people, and in having users create content rather than just consume, both seem appropriate to the flat web 2.0.

So am I comfortable with knocking down the tower of English online? Hand me the sledgehammer.