Chinese blogs: An organized translation effort

One of my favorite sources for current media developments in China is Roland Soong, who runs the EastSouthWestNorth blog (東南西北) from Hong Kong. He has been directly responsible for alerting me to interesting or unusual incidents, such as the Freezing Point fiasco, and what I believe to be the first-ever spontaneous mass political demonstration in a virtual world. The reasons Roland has been such a good source: his "news junky" personality, his sensitivity to differences between Western and Chinese media practices, and his bilingual abilities.

Now Roland and a few other bloggers are participating in a much more organized effort to translate interesting or important conversations taking place in the Chinese-language Internet. Former Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon explains:

Roland has become one of the most famous Chinese-English "bridge bloggers," bringing articles, blog posts, conversations, and debates from the Chinese-language Internet to the attention of the English-speaking world.  But there are many other people doing this on their own blogs. They include John, LfC, the good folks at Danwei, Interlocals, the China Media Project, the team at China Digital Times and many many more bilingual bloggers scattered around Greater China and across the globe.

The problem, as John points out, is that so far there has been little co-ordination about who is working on what, and people are often worried about duplication (i.e., whether Roland will beat them to the punch after they spend hours working on something).

The solution: Something Roland calls "Open Source Translation Blogging." Participants have set up a wiki, where you can sign up (if you can read Chinese and are willing to help identify and translate Chinese Web discussions) or find out about the translations projects that are being worked on. It's too early to tell if the translation project will be a success, but there really is a need for such an effort, and this one is really leveraging the power of the Internet -- and blogs -- in a constructive way.