Within four hours of the release of Cuban dissident and Maleconazo leader, Eduardo Díaz Fleitas, Animal Político journalist José Merino scored a telephone interview. How’d this happen? Through a tweet by Yoani Sánchez that was re-tweeted by the ever-impressive @tipographo.

So, ladies and gentlemen, my translation of José Merino’s interview with Díaz Fleitas [hyperlinks are my own]:

Exclusive interview with Diaz Fleitas, four hours after his liberation

Eduardo Diaz Fleitas is one of the most well-known faces of Cuban dissidence. Detained during the Black Spring of 2003, today Eduardo is finally back at home with his family in Pinar del Rio province. Diaz Fleitas returns with diminished health after eight years of incarceration, but with complete clarity about what comes next: the fight for a democratic Cuba that respects human rights.

Four hours after his liberation, we communicated with him to understand the details of his health, the years he spent in prison, and what comes next in the struggle.

How are you?

I am very well, thank God. Despite being sick, I feel well. I am back at home, with my family. I’ve had four hours [of freedom] and just imagine, I’m completely happy.

How did your family receive you?

With wide eyes. Not just my family, but the entire neighborhood, my whole town. This has been phenomenal.

How was your stay in prison?

Well, the conditions are precarious, which is more serious in my case because I have a number of sicknesses, a general allergy that worsens in places that are not clean. Prison was terrible for my health.

And how did they treat you?

Their treatment was always acceptable. The food is what stands out. As you can imagine, it’s a difficult diet. In these eight years – and with my health conditions – I could hardly eat anything.

What’s next for you and the struggle?

Well, they gave me extra-legal freedom because they wanted to and because others pressured them to do so. What follows for me, of course, is to keep pushing for human rights and democracy in Cuba. I will keep working. After eight years in prison I will keep fighting.

Any specific action?

Yes, of course. On February 23 we will do a five-day hunger strike in the prisons and on the streets in order to commemorate the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo a year ago. I will do it here in my town, Entronque de Herradura.

How do you imagine a democratic Cuba?

Can you imagine! That would be the greatest blessing for Cuba, which yearns for democracy and the respect of basic human rights.

If you had Raul Castro in front of you, what would you say?

I would tell him to realize that the people of Cuba need change and transformation. He needs to ask the people what it is that they want, so that they can freely choose a leader. And if [the current government] wins then we will work with them. But if they lose we ask that they give way.

Anything else you would like to tell us?

Please, publish for me the names of those who remain in prison – I am going to read their names slowly: the doctor Oscar Biset remains, Hector Maceda remains, Angel Juan Moya remains, Pedro Aguelles remains, Diosdado Gonzalez remains, Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia remains, Ivan Hernandez Carrillo remains, Librado Linares Garcia remain. They all remain in prison, and surely others that I am forgetting.

I understand that you need to hang up. Any message for Mexico?

My respect for the Mexicans that fight for Cuban democracy. I only ask that they work toward the freedom of those who are still in prison in Cuba.

This post focuses on the technology of subtitling online video: how it is done, how it has been improved, and what obstacles and opportunities lay in the road ahead as we move toward a world where information is made accessible to as many people as possible, irrespective of language, or hearing and sight impairment.

dotSUB and Universal Subtitles

There are currently two major online tools to subtitle videos, dotSUB and Universal Subtitles. dotSUB is a proprietary, commercial tool that is focused on providing subtitling and captioning solutions to commercial content producers. Their technology also powers TED’s Open Translation Project which enables volunteer translators to make TED videos available in nearly 80 different languages. In addition to providing enterprise solutions to corporate clients, dotSUB also has a fairly active volunteer translator community that uses the website to upload, caption, translate, and share videos that they are interested in. Universal Subtitles is a new tool that was just recently launched by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the group behind Miro, an open source podcasting and video client similar to iTunes. Universal Subtitles is an open source, Javascript-based widget that allows the subtitling of videos hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv, DailyMotion, and also self-hosted videos. Unlike dotSUB, which only has a Flash-based video player, Universal Subtitles also supports HTML5 so that subtitled videos can be viewed on devices that do not support Flash, such as the iPhone and iPad.

For the user deciding between the two tools there are a few important differences to keep in mind. As of this post, Universal Subtitles is still in beta and thus less stable than dotSUB, which has been around for several years now. On the other hand, Universal Subtitles offers several features that are not possible with dotSUB. Perhaps most importantly, dotSUB forces users to first caption a video in its original language before adding subtitles in another language. While the intention is to promote quality translations while the video is translated into other languages, it might discourage users who would like to make it accessible to speakers of another language without taking the time-consuming step of first captioning the video in its original language. Universal Subtitles allows you to instantly add subtitles in any language you would like. Also unlike dotSUB, Universal Subtitles does not require you to host the video on their website. As a matter of fact, you are not able to. Rather, they simply offer you a tool to place subtitles as a layer over any existing video that is hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv, or on your own website. This also implies an interesting legal distinction — a subtitled video is legally considered a derivative work, which means you must first secure the permission of the copyright holder. But one could argue that Universal Subtitles as a tool does not produce subtitled videos; rather they facilitate a way for viewers to lay a text file over an already existing video.

Most importantly, both tools are free to use and allow users to make online video accessible in more languages. Both tools allow you to download copies of the subtitles that you have produced in various formats, but dotSUB only allows the “owner” of the video to download the subtitles while Universal Subtitles gives all users access. Neither dotSUB nor Universal Subtitles allow you to download a copy of the video with embedded subtitles. In order to watch the video with subtitles offline we will need to go through a few more steps.

The Workflow

I used both Universal Subtitles and dotSUb to add subtitles to the video. Renata Avila helped me with the captioning of the video in Spanish on dotSUB and I then translated it into English. On Universal Subtitles I simply typed in the English translation as I watched the video.

There are two types of subtitles, hard and soft. Hard subtitles are burned into the video, meaning that they always appear whenever you watch the video. Soft subtitles give you the option to watch the video with or without subtitles/captions (as we are used to when we watch DVD’s). Unfortunately most online video currently uses hard subtitles (for example, on Netflix you cannot turn subtitles on or off), but in fact many video formats including QuickTime, Divx, and OGG allow ways to embed soft subtitles that can be turned on or off in your video player.

In order to watch the above video with English and Spanish subtitles on my iPhone I will use a program called iSubtitle. (Subler is another choice, an open source program that allows the embedding of subtitles into QuickTime files.) First I download the video from YouTube using Evom. Then I download the subtitles from either Universal Subtitles or dotSUB. I open iSubtitle and import both the video and the two subtitle files.

I can change the font size of the subtitles, adjust the timing, and change the metadata of the video file itself, which is especially handy for podcasters. Then I export the video with the subtitles embedded into the video file itself. Depending on the speed of your computer, a five minute video tends to take between 10 – 15 minutes to export. Now I must upload the video once again to my blog in order for my readers to download the subtitled version of the video so that they can later view it in either Spanish or English on their mobile devices. (I still don’t have a transcript of the video in the woman’s native Awajún language.) Here is a screenshot of what it looks like on an iPhone:

If you are subscribed to the podcast of my blog then you will automatically receive the video in iTunes where you can also view the subtitles.

From TV to Online Video – Two Steps Back

Earlier this month I was at the Open Subtitles Design Summit in New York City, which was hosted by Universal Subtitles and funded by Open Society Institute’s Information Program. (Disclosure: I am currently a consultant for OSI’s Information and Latin America programs.) The meeting brought together around 40 technologists, translators, filmmakers, and accessibility advocates to discuss the current state of online subtitling. Much of the meeting focused on taking stock of current tools, techniques, and strategies to caption and subtitle online video.

Larry Goldberg of the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH helped provide a historical account of the rise of captions and subtitles on television. According to Goldberg, captioning of television content was initially government funded. Later, costs were split between the producer, distributor, and sponsors of a particular program. It wasn’t until SAP came along to offer Spanish dubbing of English-language programming, says Goldberg, that content producers saw the value in making their shows available in more languages to reach a larger audience. Today nearly all content on major television networks in the United States is captioned, but only a very small fraction of online video is captioned and/or subtitled.¹ That will likely soon change thanks to the passage of H.R. 3101, otherwise known as The Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which was passed into law just last week after years years of advocacy – much of which took place on Facebook. (A captioned video of President Obama signing the new law is available on YouTube.)

As Robert Goodwin writes in his post celebrating the bill’s passage, it will probably be some time until there is an explosion of captioned and subtitled video on the net. Not only must the Federal Communications Commission write the official regulations, but toolmakers must build captioning into their video players and content producers must develop workflows to publish captions along with videos. So far there are few guides as to how this should be done and little agreement about standards. A post published last year on the Netflix blog, for example, explains why it has taken them over a year to develop a captioning and subtitling solution for their online streaming service. Hulu, meanwhile, was one of the early online leaders in offering closed captioning but still only offers around 5% of content with captions, and that number seems to be shrinking.

Future Opportunities and Challenges

The wild west of online subtitling today presents both several opportunities and challenges for the future. Let’s start with the opportunities.

Why Pay for Free?

According to Larry Goldberg’s calculations, it currently costs mainstream video producers around $600 to caption 22 minutes of pre-produced sitcom programming. Given that there are typically 2.5 words per second in most sitcoms, it would cost around $330 per episode to translate the captions into another language at the reasonable market price of 10 cents per word. In practice, most video producers actually pay around $30 per minute of subtitling, which adds up to $660 per episode, just as much as the original captioning.

The grand irony is that existing subtitles already exist for the most popular English-language television programs in dozens of other languages. You can find many of them at OpenSubtitles.org. One user from Finland has uploaded no less than 2,754 Finnish subtitles this year alone to popular movies and television shows. It is ridiculous for TV and video producers to spend tens of thousands of dollars on captioning and subtitling when their fans are already doing it for free. Some smart and charismatic entrepreneur will eventually be able to convince them of this, and will probably make a good deal of money doing so. (For example, by charging these content producers for community management and quality assurance tools.)

Make Video Search Suck Less

Searching for video — or even worse, searching for particular scenes in a video — is notoriously terrible. In fact, it’s quite clear that Google’s roll out of automatic captions in YouTube videos was not to make them more accessible (the quality isn’t good enough), but rather to improve searchability of video content. By having access to vast amounts of video captions (and not allowing Google to index those captions), a company could quite easily launch a video search engine that is better than what Google could offer. I could easily imagine a company like Blinkx paying a subscription fee for access to captions and subtitles of video.

Targeted (and more annoying) Advertising

According to Nielsen, online advertising fell overall in 2009, but ad spend on online videos grew 41%. Still, most advertising companies struggle to know where they should place their ads. Keyword analysis of caption and subtitle files could revolutionize how advertisers decide to place ads in online video. There was also some talk at the Open Subtitles Design Summit of creating hyperlinkable captions/subtitles to make video more interactive (and also to fill it with spam links, of course).

Now let’s talk about some of the challenges.

Lack of Business Use Cases

Despite the clear opportunity to make money in this field, most content producers still need to be convinced that it is in their interest to caption and subtitle their videos. No authoritative research has yet been undertaken to measure how captions and subtitles are used online. For example, CNET TV is one of the few online-only video producers that caption all of their videos. What has been the effect? Does the bounce rate change? Has their been a social impact? Do their advertisers recognize value in the captions? Would their viewers be willing to voluntarily translate the captions into other languages?

The Quality Question

I have recently watched two subtitled videos. The first was the Garden State DVD with professionally produced Spanish-language subtitles and the second was a pirated, downloaded version of La Teta Asustada with amateur English-language subtitles from Open Subtitles. For my personal tastes, the amateur subtitles for La Teta Asustada were of far greater quality than the professional subtitles included on the Garden State DVD (which were so bad they were hilarious). But as many people at the meeting noted, it is one thing to make a small mistake on the subtitles of a Hollywood movie and quite another on an educational video for medical students. For everyone interested in best practices and quality assurance, a sub-group at the meeting has started a document on the event wiki. I also recommend Peter Kaufman’s newly published guide, “Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web: A Guide to Best Practices for Cultural Institutions.”

Helping Videos Find Subtitles

There is a good chance that subtitles already exist online for most major movies in most major languages. In fact, as an experiment I just searched for Spanish-language subtitles for the top eight most popular movies on The Pirate Bay and found them without any problems. (Just search the title of the movie followed by ‘subtitles spanish’.) In fact, often times there are multiple versions of subtitles for the same video. As I have mentioned before, in Italy there were actually competing volunteer teams to see who could subtitle the latest episode of Lost the fastest. What doesn’t exist is a service that notifies users when subtitles are available for a particular video. Fortunately, the team at Participatory Culture Foundation is already starting to work on such a system:

We’ve been toying with the following idea: you’re watching a video and you notice that Miro’s “subtitles” button is glowing. This means there are subtitles available in a language that you speak; clicking the button pops the subtitles over your video (holding the button displays all the different languages available and subtitle versions).

Much of the protocol could be modeled on the same system that notifies readers of a web page when it can be read as an RSS file. So far the closest such lookup tool, ironically, seems to only be available for the iPhone.

Brian McConnel of Worldwide Lexicon noted that such a lookup system should not just be limited to video content, but should also apply to text and audio. Just like a single video might be published 30 different places on the internet, a single Associated Press article is often re-published hundreds of times. If that article is translated into Portuguese just once, then I should be notified of the available translation no matter where I come across the article. I won’t get into all of the technical details of implementing such a lookup protocol, but again notes are available on the event wiki.

Easy Wins

The first thing we need is to get more people subtitling more videos. It’s a great way to improve your language skills. Go to YouTube, find a video you’re passionate about, and start translating it using Universal Subtitles. If you need suggestions, Atenco: Romper el Cerco is an important video about human rights abuses in Mexico that is available in Spanish and English, but should also be made available in other languages.

Al Jazeera is a great candidate to make use of Universal Subtitles. Already they publish all of their content under flexible Creative Commons licenses, but they are still burning hard subtitles into their videos rather than using soft subtitle overlays. In fact, their video player doesn’t even allow captions or subtitles. Last month they published a fascinating documentary on the resurgence of violence and displacement in Colombia, but sadly the video is not even accessible to Colombians themselves because there is no easy way to translate the subtitles into Spanish.

iTunes U is, I believe, one of the most valuable and under-rated resources on the net. It still boggles my mind that anyone pays a cent for higher education (much less tens of thousands of dollars) with so many lectures available for free online. Why go to MIT for creative writing, for example, when you can download a video of a lecture by Junot Diaz to your iPod or TV. And, better yet, the video is captioned, as are thousands of others on iTunes U.² Hopefully future versions of Universal Subtitles will automatically detect those embedded captions and enable users to make educational lectures available to speakers of other languages. iTunes U is too valuable of a resource to be limited to just English speakers.

Peruvian protesters in June 2009 at Devil’s Curve. Photograph by Enrique Castro-Mendivil.

The Protest

Earlier that year Peru signed a free trade agreement with the United States that opened up water management, timber, oil, and mining to privatization and foreign investment. In terms of economic growth the free trade agreement has been a smashing success and Peru’s growth rate – nearly 10 percent – has been a major player in the global economic recovery, according to the International Monetary Fund. As is common with economic development derived from natural resources, the flow of foreign investment into Peru has undoubtedly benefited some segments of the country more than others. (A year earlier audio files anonymously uploaded to Wikileaks caused the “2008 Peru oil scandal” in which Peruvian politicians were accused of accepting bribes to secure contracts for foreign firms.)

The first week of June 2009 a group of mostly Awajún Peruvians created a roadblock along a stretch of highway known as “Devil’s Curve” about 870 miles north of Lima in the Amazonian province of Bagua. They created the roadblock, which prevented supplies from reaching Bagua city, in order to protest how wealth was being distributed from natural resource extraction on land where they have lived for centuries. On June 5 police were sent to remove the roadblock. Violent clashes that day between the police and protesters left at least 22 people dead, including 12 police officers. President Alan Garcia compared the indigenous protesters to the brutal Shining Path guerilla insurgency of the 80′s and 90′s, and sent federal troops into the region. Police and soldiers fired shots into crowds of protesters from helicopters. By the end of the week 12 police officers and 22 indigenous Peruvians were killed.

The Media

In a forthcoming paper that will be presented at next week’s Latin American Studies Association annual conference in Toronto, Peruvian investigative journalist and blogger Jacqueline Fowks shows how Lima’s mainstream media coverage of the Bagua protests succumbed to usual stereotypes of “warrior indians” with spears drawn while calling out “battle cries.” The leader of AIDESEP, a coalition of local, indigenous rights groups, was filmed with shaky cameras that constantly zoomed in and out to portray a sense of anxiety, while government politicians were filmed using steady tripods, which communicates a sense of calm. The nightly newscasts played story after story about the violence, but there was hardly any analysis about the free trade agreement, mining contracts, and legislative decrees that led to the protests in the first place.

News anchors repeatedly mispronounced the names of indigenous leaders. Mainstream media soon adopted the same vocabulary as the government to describe the events. Police officers were “assassinated” while indigenous protesters were “deceased” (“fallecidos“). When indigenous leaders were interviewed by some reporters, such as Rosa María Palacios, they were ridiculed for not speaking Spanish fluently even though none of the reporters were able to speak to the protesters in their native Awajún.

Despite this general panorama of the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Bagua protests, Fowks does point out that there were some exceptions to the rule. A few journalists did try to also show the conflict from the point of view of the Awajún, but language remained a crucial divide.

On June 8 Frecuencia Latina aired a segment titled “The Vision of the Overcome” (“La Visión de los Vencidos“), which showed Awajún reactions to the deaths of their fellow residents. During this highly emotional time the Awajún interviewees did their best to respond in halting Spanish, fully aware that Peruvian journalists do not speak their language. However, the most powerful moment of the segment comes at the 21 second mark and lasts until 1:26. It shows a sobbing Awajún woman screaming angrily in her native language after her husband had just been buried. Frecuencia Latina aired a full minute of her highly emotional testimony on primetime broadcast television, but they did not include any subtitles or description of what she said. Here is the full video of the original segment:

One of Peru’s largest broadcast media companies was not able (or willing) to find a single Awajún speaker to provide a translation of the woman’s testimony. In fact, the segment exemplifies the treatment of indigenous Peruvians in Lima’s media: seen but not heard; portrayed, but not listened to.

When Jacqueline Fowks watched the segment she immediately decided to find an Awajún speaker to translate the woman’s words. The next day she wrote to Fermín Tiwi, an Awajún lawyer from Bagua who was temporarily living in Lima. The following day she received the translation, which she posted on her blog. That post was widely linked to by influential bloggers such as Marco Sifuentes and was read 12,000 times; more than any other post on Fowks’ blog. What the Awajún woman said was this:

Please listen to us Mr. Alan Garcia:
You are guilty because you exterminated us.
You are killing us.
You are selling us.
You are the terrorist.
We are defending our territory without the use of guns, our only weapons are spears and small sticks that aren’t meant to kill like you have done to us.
You exterminated us using guns, bullets, helicopters, and you killed our brothers, sisters, students, teachers, children.
Alan, we ask you to come here to our territory and pay us the debt that you owe us.
Alan, you sold the country, you sold the indigenous, you sold our natural resources: gold, petroleum, water, and air. You contaminate our natural environment and you leave us poorer. Now you see how we live and how you’ve left us.
We, the Awajún-Wampis have not asked you to exterminate us, but rather that you help us. That you help educate our children that you have now killed.
We are not taking away your private property. We have not killed your children, your family. Why are you know finishing us off?
You have exterminated us! We are left with nothing!!

The Technology

When I read the transcription of the sobbing woman’s words on Fowks’ blog, the Bagua protest/massacre ceased to be just another indigenous protest; one of thousands that take place in Latin America every year. (Beatriz Merino has noted that there were 260 social conflicts in Peru in April 2009 alone.) Those words brought a swollen lump to my throat and water to my eyes. As an American consumer of cheap timber, oil, and minerals, I know that I am also implicated in her rage, even if she does not know that herself.

After receiving the translation from Tiwi, Fowks forwarded it on to Frecuencia Latina and asked them to re-air the segment with subtitles. The following day they did, as you can see in this shaky video uploaded by YouTube user “tvbruto01″:

That is the closest we have of a subtitled video of this nameless woman’s important testimony. Until today her words were never made available in English. I assume that you agree with me that her testimony is an important historical document, not just as it relates to the Bagua protest/massacre but also the Awajún community, the relationship between the Peruvian government in Lima and its multicultural residents in the provinces, and the social and environmental impacts of free trade agreements with the United States.

Frecuencia Latina should be celebrated for its role in airing one of the few broadcast segments that show the impact of Bagua from the perspective of the Awajún-Wampi community. But there is no excuse to air the important and compelling testimony of a woman without offering subtitled translation. The internet now offers us new opportunities and challenges to make video content accessible in all languages, and for the hearing impaired. In the next post I will review the current state of technology related to subtitling online video, and review some of the obstacles and opportunities to make more content accessible for more people.

But first I wanted to take the time to show the importance of subtitling. Peru’s economy continues to grow spectacularly despite the global economic downturn. A new generation of Peruvian elites enjoy top-rate and increasingly expensive Peruvian cuisine in the capital while indigenous communities continue to organize, especially in the natural resource-rich north of the country. The Bagua protests lead to several important consequences. The two decrees that caused the protests in the first place were overturned and Prime Minister Yehude Simon resigned. Congress passed a new law to gives indigenous people the right to be consulted ahead of any projects on their land, but many doubt that the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (Indepa) has sufficient resources or powers to enforce the law and broker the conversations. Whether the government in Lima and Peru’s 7,000 indigenous communities (making up one third of the population) will speak the same language depends both on their commitment to listen to each other, and to embrace the importance of translation.

Mexico’s “General Population Act” is similar to, or at least as racist as, Arizona’s SB-1070

The powerful arrival of SB-1070, even in its now more moderate form, represents a setback regarding the respect for human rights for those seeking work in other countries because of a lack of opportunities in their own. Stopping someone for merely appearing to be a “migrant” (who knows what that means or how it’s determined) is to be condemned because it represents an act of discrimination.

In Mexico we have protested against this law, and we are willing to demonstrate in the streets, but we haven’t even stopped to question our own treatment by local and federal authorities of migrants who pass through our country on their way to the United States.

Have we taken the time to review our own “General Population Act”, which has some of the same parameters as Arizona’s SB-1070?

The General Population Act (LGP) and its regulations governing the stay of foreigners in our country, requires that every authority must verify the immigration status of aliens applying for a process or service. Our foreign friends who have attempted to open a bank account or work even part time without carrying their documentation with them can confirm the enforcement of the act.

Groupo Beta undercover police agents grab a youth near an immigration checkpoint in Chiapas, Mexico. Along the rail line, Beta agents pursue robbers who prey upon hapless migrants. ( Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times )

Just like in Arizona, getting a job in Mexico is risky if you’re undocumented. Article 74 of the Act states that:

No one should give employment to aliens who have not first verified legally in the country and without obtaining specific authorization to provide that particular service.

Supposedly only the National Migration Institute (INM) can detain those who do not prove their status, but just like in Arizona, they can solicit the help of local police and, if necessary, place the migrants in prison according to Article 94:

The authorities of the Federation, states and municipalities, will be auxiliary to the Interior Ministry in functions that correspond in terms of population registration.

Just like in Arizona, police are given the possibility to question immigrants anywhere in Mexico, and if they find any violation of the law, they are “the authorized personnel to carry out their duties for public safety,” says Article 152 of the General Population Act:

If in the course of the investigation a violation of the provisions of the Act is revealed, the regulations that merit their expulsion abroad of migrants will be carried out by the authorized personnel [including police].

The “charge” of appearing Central American

In Mexico operations against undocumented immigrants across the country who are classified in a discriminatory manner by having “Central American features” are common. They are persecuted, harassed and, if even if they are Mexican but have a strange accent different from that of the center of the country, they are classified as “non-Mexicans.”

It’s depressing the stories of the abuses subjected by citizens who travel “The Beast“, the freight train from Chiapas in the south to the border with the United States. Rape, extortion kidnappings, and if for some reason they ask help of the police, then they are doubly extorted.

Undocumented Central Americans crowd the tops of freight train cars in Mexico. They will be treated as lawbreaking foreigners if caught, but cargo rail lines have become a major passageway north to the U.S. border. ( Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times )

We should pause a bit to think as we protest the treatment that they want to give us in Arizona, why are we not outraged by the treatment we give to immigrants across our country or those who settle here, such as our Argentine friends, in search of a better future.

Some time ago, I was walking along Barranquilla (in Medellin, between the University of Antioquia and Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital) and I found a series of messages that caught my interest. Among them was one that was especially striking, which read “soledad es que nadie me lea” (loneliness is nobody reading me). Recently I was walking there again and I found myself once again in front of that same message, only now it transmitted more loneliness.

Ever since that day, passing by there has meant something different to me. Why do we write if with time our words are erased, sometimes by the very effect of time itself? Maybe our words do arrive to some, but will they retain their original memory and significance? Maybe our writing does affect the thinking, the sensibility, of others. And what if with the passing time that changes?

Maybe writing is worth it … maybe not.

Maybe it is simply relief …

What do you think? Why do you do it?

The abortion issue has been somewhat controversial these days, especially here in Colombia. On the same street (Barranquilla), I found many messages tagged on the walls in support of the right to abortion.

“I abort, you abort, we all abort,” reads one message. The other demands for the passage of a law to legalize abortion in Colombia.

Personally I support the right to abortion, but I also understand why many people do not support it. Recently, Adriana of Hiperbarrio Ituango published on her blog an entry about abortion. I commented to show my point of view, trying not to offend her, for these issues always lend themselves to disrespect and polemic talk about Chavez or Uribe. In fact, here on my blog, I recently had a comment about an entry that talked about the issue of abortion where I was invited to “read, get cultured, and not write nonsense.” On the other hand, Adriana responded to my comment with complete respect even though we disagree. How great it would be if we all respected one another like that.

I’ve been a bit out of touch from my blog and from commenting on the blogs of others lately, but I’ll take this opportunity to check out and comment on the following links:

The video “Parish of Santa Barbara” by Lina Macias and Leidy Upegui of HiperBarrio Ituango

In the blogs of Hiperbarrio Ituango there are some new entries. Adriana not only shares her views on abortion, also invites us to look at her photos of the beautiful countryside of Ituango in a new entry called “Landscapes.” Lina, who blogs at Angelesituango, shares some beautiful photos and texts about Ituango’s Cultural Week in a post called “Ituango is Culture!”

At ConVerGentes (Hiperbarrio La Loma) we have been very active with pinhole photography workshops on Mondays and Fridays and video workshops on Saturdays. We have new members and renewed enthusiasm (Some recommended articles: “The Hiperbarrio family continues growing,” and “Pinhole photography workshops.” Also, more posts, photos, and video.)

Finally, I leave you with an interesting image taken in Caldas in a visit to someone who makes me happy.

“More oxygen, less politics.”

The following is my translation of Paula Gonzalo’s interview with Juan Arellano about the Lingua Project on Global Voices. Links have been changed to their English-language equivalents when possible.

Juan Arellano is one of the bloggers who, beginning in 2007, has been working as an editor for the Global Voices Lingua project, one of the sites on the Internet that has helped popularize citizen journalism in Spanish and other languages through its network of local bloggers.

In an interview with Periodismo Ciudadano, Arellano offers us more details about the project.

PC – How would you define Global Voices and what do you think is the key to its success?

JA – Well, by serving as a place on the Internet where you can find news and discussions from around the world based on the perspectives of common people – bloggers and internet users in general. Not only that, but also conversations that start on the various web platforms. This is an alternative and complementary perspective to that which is provided by traditional media. We tend to feature issues that don’t usually appear in the mainstream media, or if they do it is with little emphasis or with a long delay, such as with reported cases of attacks against human rights or freedom of expression in African and Asian countries, for example. Also – and this is from an internal point of view – it is a great community of people who are very enterprising, proactive and supportive. Working with them is really very inspiring.

PC – How can citizens participate in Global Voices?. What is your relationship with local bloggers and what process do you follow from the time you discover citizen news?

JA – Well there are different levels [of participation], beginning with the simple fact that just reading the site can be considered a type of participation. You can comment and give your own opinion as well. But the main way of contributing is to publish a post on your own blog about any topic that interests you and send a link to one of our authors so that they keep it in mind. We are always looking for new topics to write about! Especially those that are being widely discussed by bloggers, of course. The volunteer authors that write for Global Voices have deep knowledge of the local blogosphere of the countries they write about, and they comb through those blogs continually, but it’s always possible that they miss something. So it would really be very useful if more bloggers help us provide a complete picture of online views about current issues, especially issues that aren’t being covered well [by the mainstream media].

PC – What is the Lingua Project?

JA – Lingua is a very special project of Global Voices. Unlike the other two projects – Advocacy and Rising Voices – that had more formal beginnings, Lingua came about informally from the grassroots. It was Portnoy, a Taiwanese reader of GV who in 2005 began translating articles from GV to Chinese (read interview here). Later Portnoy became an integral part of Global Voices and in 2006 and 2007 we saw additional versions of Global Voices in other languages such as Bangla, French and, of course, Spanish. The independent beginnings of Lingua are maintained to this day. Anyone interested in forming a version of Global Voices in their own language can contact us about how to make it happen.

But basically Lingua is a project to disseminate what has been published on Global Voices in English to other languages, which is related to one of our main objectives: amplifying conversations that take place in places that are more or less closed off because of linguistic barriers or because little is known about these communities by the general public. In a way, Lingua also closes the circle of the online pilgrimage of information. Take, for example, the discussion about some issue in the Moroccan blogosphere (which may be in Arabic, English or French). An author on Global Voices translates excerpts from those posts into English and publishes them in English on Global Voices. Lingua volunteers then translate them into Chinese, Malagasy, Italian, and also French and Arabic, just to name a few. In this way the very bloggers whose posts were the basis for the article in English can now read that article in their own language and see how their excerpts were used. And people from other blogosphere who would not normally have knowledge of what is happening in Morocco can now show their solidarity or difference of opinion, or just simply stay informed.

PC – You have a lot of volunteers who live under repressive regimes. What is the importance of these partners? How does Global Voices fight against censorship in the world?

I mentioned Advocacy, which is the project of Global Voices to protect freedom of expression and free access to information. Sami, who is director of Advocacy, has organized a network of bloggers that deal with these issues and the attacks against bloggers and journalists in the various countries where there is strong repression, as well as other places where perhaps censorship is not as obvious or well-publicized. By disseminating this information we hope to create more awareness about censorship, and also to support those in need. The goal is not just reaction, but also prevention; which is why Advocacy, in collaboration with other organizations, produces guides such as The Guide to Anonymous Blogging, or Blogging for a Cause, which will hopefully help to provide tips and greater security to bloggers who, because of what they write about, may be subject to censorship.

PC – What are the changes that you incorporated to your Twitter network?

JA – Until just a few months ago it was only an account linked to TweeterFeed that automatically published the headlines of our most recent posts. Now we re-tweet what is being said by people from across Latin America and we also generate our own tweets. The dynamic varies based on what is being said and how much time we have to check the Spanish-language “twittersphere”. We believe that it is bringing more readers to GV in Spanish, which pleases us. (@gvenespanol).

PC – How many people visit the site and how many news items to you publish each day?

Now, we have approximately an average of 40,000 hits per month, which is not that much really. I think we still have room to grow. The number of visits [to the Spanish version of Global Voices] is about 8% of the total monthly visits to Global Voices as a whole. And the number of articles we publish is between three to five [long posts] per day, accompanied by the same number of short news posts. The number of people commenting on our posts has increased lately, especially in posts that are about Latin American countries, which are read mostly by readers from Spain. Regarding the number of volunteer translators, it varies a lot. They all support the project according to their means and often alternate between periods of intense activity and other periods where they are virtually dead, which is why I never say no to an offer of collaboration!

A very good opportunity to participate in a wonderful network of citizen journalists for all of you with a blog who want to work with high-quality information.

Portnoy was ahead of his time. Fast forward three and a half years and the number of translators on Global Voices is greater than the number of authors and editors. Our articles are regularly translated into about 20 different languages and Jer has developed an entire system within WordPress to manage and organize the translations of articles. Additionally, we are no longer alone. Meedan is translating articles and conversations about current events in the Middle East. Yeeyan serves as a hub for volunteer translators who translate between Chinese and English. And TED has had much success recruiting volunteers to translate and subtitle their videos.

Furthermore, a number of open source programmers have begun developing tools to serve this ever-expanding group of volunteer translators. Those tools must also compete with proprietary tools like Google’s new Translator Toolkit, which was recently used by volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic.

Aspriation Tech, an NGO based in San Francisco, invited a number of translators, programmers, and publishers to Amsterdam last week to discuss how the social translation movement can be made more efficient, sustainable, and fun. Representing Global Voices at the gathering were Solana, Leonard, Georgia, Ivan, Ethan, Silvia, Anna, Rezwan, Jer, Paula, Marc, and me. For those interested in learning more, notes from all the sessions are available on the Open Translation Tools wiki, Ethan has a nice summary blog post, photos are on Flickr, and updates are on Twitter, and more related blog posts are available here. For those of you who wish to learn more about open source translation software, a valuable guide has been published on FLOSSManuals. There is another guide about open source “video translation”. For more information about the history of Lingua, Leonard has made an excellent timeline and Chris Salzberg has done thorough academic research on the community.

Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry can only grow at 1% (the average growth rate of the earth’s population). There is, after all, only so much food you can stuff down one person. The food industry got around this limitation by developing “foods” without any calories or fat – things like Coke Zero and potato chips made with Olean, which famously – so I’ve been told – causes anal leakage:

[Hence the need for anal bleaching.]

Information is also an inelastic good. There is a limit to how much information the human brain can consume in a single day. Once we reach that limit we develop information obesity – or, information overload as it’s normally called – which leads to stress, guilt, and feelings of meaninglessness. We may ask ourselves what is the point of drinking a diet soda that our bodies do not need. And we might also ask ourselves, what is the use of consuming information at all, and how do we know if we need it or not?

Information has always been a commodity. The greater the demand for information, and the more scarce that information is, the greater its value. The business model behind selling information has always been to function as a gatekeeper between the information and the access to that information. In relation to one another, information was scarce and demand was high.

That is, until all of the world’s information was made available in aggregate. Added to the “old media” are billions of contributions of information from sources that were previously excluded by the gatekeepers. Demand for information has stayed the same (after all, there is only so much the human brain can process per day) but the supply of information expands exponentially. (Kevin Kelly calls this phenomenon “the expansion of ignorance“.)

As information expands exponentially, the value of each individual piece of information declines exponentially. With the abundance of information comes the scarcity of attention. Value now lies not in information, but in its relevance: filtering, sorting, contextualizing that which “speaks to us”. Value is not in data but in eloquence.

There is, however, still one more gate between information and access to that information: language. If I were monolingual then I would only have access to a percentage of the world’s information available online. Let’s say, for example, that I wanted more information about Dao Lang, a Chinese pop star and the number one search term in China for 2005. Information about the singer in English is scant, but surely there are thousands of articles available in Chinese. If only I could request – and probably pay – someone to translate one of those articles into English.

Conceptualizing a system to allow readers to request translations of content that interest them and to facilitate the process of that translation is the new job description for Marc Herman who is leading Global Voices’ translation exchange.

I am skeptical of the project, but it’s the type of skepticism that I hope is proven wrong. The most obvious question is, how do I know that I want to read something if I don’t know what it says? And, more importantly, why would I invest time and money requesting more information with less context when my hard drive is already brimming over with unread articles, unwatched movies, and un-listened-to podcasts?

To make such an investment I would need a pretty strong connection to Dao Lang, the Chinese pop singer. And if such a strong connection existed, wouldn’t that inspire me to learn Chinese, or to meet fellow Dao Lang fans who could provide me with the context I’m looking for?

We consume information as much for our social needs as our need to be informed. In fact, I’m not sure you can even distinguish the two. We don’t really care about Mark Sanford and his affair, but we read about it because the collective awareness about the case allows us to participate in conversations about the values and issues that underlie it. When I was in Argentina 80% of the news I read was about Argentina and the region because it allowed me to engage in conversations with those around me. Now that I’m in The Hague I’m following related news. Our social interactions define the information we consume much more than the other way around.

Social translation is here to stay, but the key is that it is social. Lena translated my post about Cochabamba as a gesture of friendship. Once money is inserted into the equation it becomes something else.

A lot of communities and tools have sprung up in recent years trying to make the translation market more efficient by cutting out wasteful middleman agencies like Lionbridge. Among others are Social Translator, dotSUB, Worldwide Lexicon, and iCanLocalize. Some companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have flirted with crowdsourcing the localization of their websites, but the lesson tends to be that volunteer translators don’t feel very social toward for-profit companies. There will always be a demand for translated information, but those translations will still have to compete in a world of over-abundant information and starved attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the supply and demand of information these days. A couple months ago I walked into El Ateneo, one of the world’s largest bookstores, to meet up with my buddy Scott. As I looked around at the mountains upon mountains of hardcovers, paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers I was hit by a kind of intellectual vertigo. On the one hand, here is humanity’s greatest accomplishment: culture, the ability to transmit knowledge, stories, and values from one generation to the next to eternity. On the other hand, with sadness and frustration I realized that in my life I would only come into contact with a small percentage of that culture. And that with each new year – and the exponential expansion of information – I would come into contact with a smaller and smaller percentage. The expansion of ignorance is inevitable.

The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology and New Media

On Monday and Tuesday I’ll be at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center for a two-day conference they are putting together on how technology and new media are changing the field of human rights. On Monday I’ll be giving a workshop, which will essentially be an updated, hands-on version of “Build a Virtual Global Organization.” By the end of the workshop we will collectively put together a toolbox on Social Source Commons for anyone interested in starting an online grassroots community project. On Tuesday I will be speaking on a panel with Xiao Qing, Ron Bigler, and Kirk Boyd about “Blogging Human Rights.” I will present case studies of Ceasefire Liberia, Drop-In Center, HiperBarrio, and El Nula Por La Paz as examples of capacity-building programs that empower communities affected by human rights abuses to document their own stories rather than the old model of advocacy campaigns which speak on behalf of communities.

Fora.tv will broadcast the conference live and remote viewing hubs have been set up in New York City, Bogotá, and Medellín.

Then on Tuesday afternoon I head down to Sunnyvale to catch up with Ory, Rebecca, Amira, and Guarav at Yahoo’s “Business and Human Rights Summit.” The summit, in the words of its organizer, Ebele Okobi-Harris, “will focus on how technology and the Internet facilitate freedom of expression, with a focus upon innovative approaches to addressing government challenges.” Much of the discussion, I imagine, will build on the framework of the Global Network Initiative.

Ceasefire Liberia, NYC

Next weekend I will be meeting up with Ruthie Ackerman in New York City to visit Park Hill, Staten Island, the largest community of Liberians living outside of Liberia. A couple months ago I was in Monrovia speaking with Prince Tolkpah, Titus Alagba, and Dave Shellnut of Amnesty International about why they see a need for an online community of Liberians in the diaspora and at home to discuss issues that affect them both:

Titus has been especially active on the Ceasefire Liberia website, with informative posts on “Social and Economic Inequality in Liberia” and about flooding in Monrovia.

This coming weekend I will get to see the other side of the project – Liberians living and struggling here in the United States. Here is an amazing video by Ruthie about the Liberian community in Staten Island:

Argentina: Arrorró: Networked Lullabies

The next week I will be in Buenos Aires where I will interview visual artist and professor Gabriela Golder about her upcoming art project, Arrorró, one of twenty “Live Bits” projects as part of 80+1: A Journey Around the World. (More on this soon.)

Uruguay: Flor de Ceibo

The Ceibo tree is the national flower of both Argentina and Uruguay. It is also the name of a student-led organization to support the One Laptop Per Child Project in Uruguay. I wrote at length about the project yesterday on Rising Voices so I won’t repeat myself here, but I’m looking forward to connecting with Pablo Flores later this month in Montevideo and helping out with some workshops to get more Uruguayan youth blogging on their XO laptops.

Voces Bolivianas

In early June I head to Bolivia to meet up with my dear friends Eddie and Cristina and to finally meet Mario and Hugo, all of Voces Bolivianas.

Boston: The Future of Civic Media and Community News

Then it is back to Boston for a conference at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media where the Knight Foundation will announce this year’s winners of the Knight News Challenge. If you are interested in the latest developments in community news and citizen journalism than the Center for Future Civic Media, Knight Pulse, Idea Lab, and MediaShift are all important resources to keep your eyes on (and all Knight-funded initiatives). Here are some of the issues at stake:

Amsterdam: Open Translation Tools

The following week: Amsterdam for the Open Translation Tools 2009 conference. This is a follow-up meeting to the gathering we had in 2007 in Croatia. After that meeting I wrote a five-part series on Open Software, Open Content, and Open Translation, which focused on the importance of open source software, open licensing, open translation, the then-state of localization and content translation, and obstacles to translation workflows.

I am looking forward to seeing how far we’ve come since 2007. Global Voices Lingua translation has expanded tremendously under the leadership of Leonard and Portnoy. Meedan is starting to really get going. dotSUB has partnered with TED to make their talks available in multiple languages. And perhaps most exciting of all is this news from Chris Salzberg about a new tool called Minna no Honyaku which will soon be released as open source code with the aim of translating as much online content as possible. Why translate as much online content as possible? Ethan Zuckerman makes a good argument.

Portugal: International School on Digital Transformation

Next stop: Portugal, for a week long program at the University of Porto on “Digital Transformation“. (They will hopefully digitally transform their website soon.) The University of Porto is involved in lots of cool projects including Future Places: Digital Media and Local Cultures and the Summer Institute in Digital Media.

Then comes the big project that I’ll announce in a week or two.

The next five months are going to be insane. I am sure that I will lose my mind at least a few times, but not a day goes by that I don’t think to myself (at least once) that I’m the luckiest person on this planet. To be able to work on such amazing projects with old, new, and future friends is really a dream come true.

Now it’s time to get back to work …

A nosotros la tierra nos expulsa, cada ciudad es como un trampolín desbalanceado. Vivimos al portal de la semana próxima, con amigos tenues y lugares hermosos, bañados de la luz benéfica de lo temporal. Somos nostálgicos permanentes de otra cosa, muy indefinida, que en el fondo nos aterroriza. Evitamos la pregunta en las muy frecuentes ocasiones en que nos entrevistamos a nosotros mismos. El lugar más seguro en el mundo son los diez mil pies de altura a los que se pueden volver a utilizar los aparatos electrónicos. Cambiamos de locación, vestuario, música y maquillaje porque nos da miedo ver el material de archivo y descubrir que hace años somos particularmente los mismos.

I just came back from a year of charitable light to find myself in a week of not-so-charitable Bay Area gloom. Itzpapalotl is about to take off on her own impressive itinerary.

Here’s to recognition.