Brilliant: Crowdsourced translations get the word out from Libya - tech - 25 February 2011 - New Scientist

• 18:01 25 February 2011 by Jim Giles and Jacob Aron

The oasis town of Al Khufrah lies deep in the Sahara desert in the far south-east of Libya. Lying almost 1000 kilometres from its nearest sizeable neighbour, it is not somewhere foreign journalists tend to visit.

But on 23 February, news from the town reached the English-speaking world. "Greetings this is an urgent message from Kufra," said the anonymous source. "Young people have taken complete control of the city, they hoisted the flag of Libya and Gaddafi down the flag."

The message arrived by an ingenuous route. It started with a voice message in Arabic left on a phone line operated by Google. Software managing the line published the message on Twitter, from where it was picked up by the website Alive in Libya. The tweet went out to Alive's army of volunteers, who provided an English translation for the site. It is just one of around 170 reports, from videos to tweets to audio recordings, that Alive in Libya has translated since it started on 19 February.

via newscientist.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales