Intercultural Communication and Translation News

Literally, it might be known as Voustube, Voitubo or Vocetubo, but the world’s most popular video-sharing site introduced local-language sites in nine countries on Tuesday that will all just go by YouTube.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube, which was acquired by Web search leader Google Inc for $1.65 billion last year, told a news conference here that the nine country sites will eventually feature locally popular content.

Read more: YouTube

“Our goal in developing Kontrib is to show how current language technologies can help to build and increase the dialogue across societies in spite of language barriers,” said Kirti Vashee, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Language Weaver, as his company launched the world’s first multilingual social bookmarking site: Kontrib.

Launched just two months ago and still in beta mode, Kontrib is the first news bookmarking site to accept news, offer user interfaces and integrate automated translation of stories in languages other than English, including French, Spanish and Arabic. Currently, 65% of the site’s users come from countries other than the United States, and traffic on the site has increased almost 3,500 percent since its launch.

Read more: Bookmarking 

The government’s communities secretary, Ruth Kelly, laid into translation services last week on the BBC’s Politics Show. Having information translated, she said, means people have no reason to learn English. “For example,” she said, “it’s quite possible for someone to come here from Pakistan … and to find that materials are routinely translated into their mother tongue, and therefore not have the incentive to learn English.”

Kelly seems to be making two points: that translation services are pointless and redundant; and that migrants to the UK are not motivated to learn English because everything they need is translated for them. On the first point: given Kelly’s concern with integration, surely there should be more, not less, translation of information for new arrivals? But the second point raises a far deeper issue.

Read more: Ruth Kelly

“Culture is the way love is expressed in a particular people.”