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A key change at iCommons

If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:

Dear friends,

At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more

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Can we justify being an English language movement?
1
Stian · Hamar (Norway) · Jun 22nd, 2007 10:37 am · 19 votes · 7 comments
 
Let's make all voices heard. in all languages, sdbj @ flickr (http://flickr.com/photos/sdbj/8326434/), CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
Let's make all voices heard. in all languages, by sdbj @ flickr (http://flickr.com/photos/sdbj/8326434/)
Creative Commons started in the US, but aims to be a truly global movement. The licenses have been localized into more than 35 different jurisdictions and many different languages - in most of those countries, there are thriving local communities, mailing lists, wikis, and people meeting offline. There are lot's of inspiring examples of CC being used around the world - Overmundo from Brazil, Loftwork from Japan, French music, Arabic poetry and Finnish scifi movies! All this is something that we should be very proud of.

However, the fact remains that if people from around the world want to get involved with and contribute to the global debate around both the Creative Commons licenses and the movement that is iCommons, they will have to master English. The mailing list, the icommons website and other forums are only in English, but most importantly - the annual forum where people meet and discuss the future direction of our movement is conducted only in English.

This means that to participate in Dubrovnik, you would have to be able to speak English, and to speak it well - many of the presenters, especially the native speakers spoke fast, with lot's of difficult words and expressions. And it's interesting to see how many of the presenters (although far from all - there were awesome exceptions) were native English speakers. I spoke to several people during the summit, who admitted to only understanding at best half of what was said during the plenaries - these are people who work in an international movement, and were selected for scholarships to come to Dubrovnik... how many more did not go at all, because they didn't think it would be any point, because they wouldn't be able to communicate?

I agree with Neerup in saying that the summit should include more voices, but I am not laying this squarely at the conference organizers' feet, I think they did a great job - and we all have to work together towards 2008 to create a summit that is even more broad, representative and inclusive. But if we are going to have local educators, heads of local NGOs, local artists and activists, and not just the same globetrotting gang (who are still very much welcome!), we need to facilitate it... I hope we will be able to bring in a lot of new blood from different Asian countries to the next summit, but I know from personal experiences that there are lot's of Chinese and Indonesian activists, doing amazing stuff, who will not be comfortable giving a presentation, or asking questions in English.

So what do we do? I heard lot's of comments during the summit about the need to translate and make material on open access sites available in many languages, but none regarding our own movement. If we acknowledge that this is a challenge to us as a movement, we have to apply our ingenuity and creativity towards improving the situation. I am not necessarily suggesting that we turn into some mini-UN, with booths full of interpreters and headsets, but maybe there are other ways we could improve the situation. I am just beginning to think about this - and I'd love to hear about best practices from other global conferences and events.

Could we have an IRC channel where people were rapidly typing up summaries of what people were presenting, in different languages (#isummit08-chinese etc), or we could post summaries of each days discussions in different languages... hand out powerpoint presentations or summaries in advance, provide a way for volunteer interpreters and interpretees to match up, perhaps as simple as asking some presenters to slow down and speak clearly? I would love your input on this! Global Voices aggregates and translates information between the bloggers of the world, giving us insights into the local conversations that are going on - I'd love to know how they solve this at their summit. Are there any others we could work with or learn from?

谢;;;谢;;;, Stian

tags: norway media-events languages summit08 summit07 translation accessibility


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Some random thoughts...

Regional conferences would make this easier, for example a South American summit could have Spanish as its primary language.

Even if all the panels can't be translated, keynote speakers could try and get their slides translated in advance, perhaps even the whole speech.

Video recordings could be placed on dotsub to be translated after the summit.

Are there any other global conferences without the resources of the UN that tackle this problem, and that we can learn from?
tchance · London (United Kingdom) · Jun 19th, 2007 8:24 am
1 out of 1 person believes this is useful
your take: useful lame
these are good ideas, but are they feasible?
what languages would you translate to? especially that there don't seem to be that many people keen on doing translation - and with the amount of stuff we all produce the work piles up fast. someone said 'let's translate to all languages at next summit' - this is impossible, unless you're the UN or European Parliament.
IRC summaries sound cool - but try reading any blog summaries from a conference you did not go to - it's hard to understand anything. similarly volunteer translators rarely do a good job translating in real time, even with speakers talking slow - even professional translators find this hard. So i think translation is not something that we can easily provide with some good will and simple IT resources.
Alek Tarkowski · Warszawa (Poland) · Jun 20th, 2007 8:56 pm
2 out of 2 people believe this is useful
your take: useful lame
I wouldn't suggest trying to have a hundred languages, but in the Education track, we had a great deal of success even though we usually only had twenty to thirty people. Given that, might it make sense that if there were that many speakers of a particular language who wished to come that it would be feasible for them to have a track of their own? Bilingual speakers could then attend some of each, helping ideas cross the language barrier without the difficulty of real time interpreting. Plenary sessions would still be a challenge, but might this sort of thing be worth a try?
Steve Foerster · Grand Savanne, Salisbury (Dominica) · Jun 21st, 2007 4:42 am
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your take: useful lame
Alek,
I am not saying that any of these ideas are easy to do, but I believe that we cannot afford, indeed that we have no right, to not do anything. We are not a global movement advocating free and open culture, if we only include English speakers at the top level. And we will loose out on many important and valuable contributions. The concrete suggestions I make are not very important - what is important is that we as a movement take this as a challenge. I believe that with the creativity and breadth of experience that we all possess, we should be able to come up with at least _something_ for the next summit - not perfect, but a lot less than nothing!
Stian · Hamar (Norway) · Jun 21st, 2007 4:51 am
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your take: useful lame
I think IRC channels with volunteers typing in a particular language would make a lot of sense. I think that if we can at least audio stream and hopefully video stream the sessions, these volunteers could be off-site as well.

I do think that it will be easier to translate into the local language when we do regional meetings because of the availability of translators and the low cost of local participants.

Also, while it is not "participation" I think that using something like dotSUB to translate the dialog after the conference is also an important part in allowing other languages to gain access.
Joi · Inbamura (Japan) · Jun 22nd, 2007 6:33 pm
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your take: useful lame
We had a very brief discussions here at iCommons head office over tea (chatting about what we've been reading on the website), and we recognise that language representation is an important issue for our global movement. We should really do some research into which languages need representation and how we would measure this: geographical, active projects, active cc jurisdictions etc etc. Also, as the summit grows each year and is held in different locations across the globe the issue of language is going to dominate.
· Jul 03rd, 2007 5:44 pm
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Thanks, gracias, danke, merci, shukran for the call to action article!

Stian and a few others have been busy brainstorming on the iSummit Translation node. Please feel free to join us with any ideas. Translation is hugely important, now and for the future. After all, what is a community if it cannot communicate?
Michelle Thorne · Berlin (Germany) · Aug 21st, 2007 10:54 pm
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your take: useful lame
 


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