It’s just a matter of time before instant translation will be possible, with revolutionary results for the global community, argues Jonathan Luff

A couple of years ago, as the Arab uprisings were taking place across the Middle East, I helped to organise a Whitehall seminar at which we asked one big question:

What can Western countries do to build bridges with Arab societies in transition?

Some brilliant people took part. One particular comment, from a respected journalist, resonated so powerfully with me that I couldn’t get it out of my head for days afterwards. It was this:

In the past millennium, fewer works have been translated into Arabic from English than are translated into Spanish each year.

As I mentioned, this fact stayed with me and wouldn’t go away. Eventually, I sat down to work out whether there was anything I could do to help address the challenge it presented. Was it possible, I wondered, to use technology, machine-learning, and crowd-sourcing to rebalance this incredibly one-sided equation?

To my surprise, some fantastic people shared my desire to address the challenge, and a pilot project was launched with their support to see whether the best works of English and Arabic, where they are free from copyright, could be translated from one language to the other and made available to readers wherever they are, at little or no cost.

If the pilot works (and it is still a big ‘if’), this will be a fabulous resource for Arabic and English speakers alike. Hopefully there will be more to say about this in due course. But it isn’t the main point of this blog.

See: WIRED.co.uk

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