This year we started sharing office space with Accion Latina, a non-profit organization publisher of El Tecolote newspaper. El Tecolote is part of the history of the Mission district in San Francisco, and has been a vital part of its arts and social justice movement since 1970. It has also been a training ground for many aspiring latino journalists. I’ve been helping out with occasional translations, and it’s always a thrill to see my name in old-fashion news print!
As many other independent media outlets, El Teco has been feeling the economic downturn and the challenges of adapting to new media, social networking tools and citizen journalism. Recently, they have started an alliance with Mission Loc@l, a project of hyper-local online news coverage developed by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
A couple of days ago I translated this article (english) about the upcoming Encuentro del Canto Popular, a folk music festival that Accion Latina has been organizing for 28 years with local performers.
*Photo by edgehill
This second Open Translation Tools event, held in Amsterdam in June 2009 co-organized by Aspiration, was a follow up of the fun we had in Zagreb on 2007. The other organizers were Flossmanuals.net and Translate.org.za. These events bring together people working in the field of open content translation to assess the state of software tools that support translation of content that is licensed under free or open content licenses.
You can read almost all the notes from the sessions and break out groups at the Event Wiki. Which, by the way, is one of my favorite things about Aspiration events: you can read about it in great detail, practically the same day. What you cannot do from the wiki is to bear witness to the Cultural Beverage night, but that’s a different story.
After the event, we spent five days at The Waag in a beautiful room, concentrated on a Book Sprint. Using the Flossmanuals.net platform for collaborative writing, the group in the room plus a group of remote participants, was able to finish a great resource that basically compiles the most important topics in the subject of open translation. It covers some basic concepts, an overview of the translation workflow, a few issues such as quality control and community management, special case studies and specific resources for translating text, video and images. You can read the book online, download it as pdf or buy a print version.
