Found in Translation

Twitte r’s Additions to the World’s Vocabulary
While purists often bemoan the creation of new words, it’s actually a sign that languages are
surviving and evolving to reflect a changing world. For example, the Welsh language recently
added a new verb—trydaru for “to tweet”—because of Twitter’s rapid growth in popularity. Terms
for “to tweet” are now quite common in every market where Twitter has seen success, though some
languages have employed the tried-and-true strategy of simply turning the product name into a verb
(German users prefer to twittern rather than to tweeten, just as English users like to google or to
skype), and Turkish Twitter users creatively prefer to tweetle. As if these new terms weren’t enough,
many languages have also adopted new terms for “retweet,” which is when one person sends the
same message another user sent previously via Twitter. Other languages have elected to keep it
simple, using terms that just mean “resend” or “send again.”
Wikipedia’s 284 Languages (and Counting)
If content is king, as Bill Gates famously wrote back in 1996, Wikipedia
expands the boundaries of the kingdom. How? By being among the earliest
organizations on the Internet to offer information in other languages. And oh,
what a lot of languages Wikipedia has available—a whopping 284 as of early
2012.
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However, translation plays a different role from what you might
imagine.
Like Twitter, Wikipedia relies on the volunteers in its global community.
There are about a hundred thousand people who actively volunteer their time
to edit and change Wikipedia pages. While not all of them are translators,
many of them speak more than one language. None of the independent
language versions of Wikipedia is a copy of another. Each version is an
independent cultural work, created by communities of volunteers. It isn’t
uncommon for a volunteer to contribute to Wikipedias in several languages.
Of course, there are times when users choose to translate a Wikipedia article
instead of writing a brand-new one from scratch. “Translation is more
common for core sciences and mathematics,” explains Jay Walsh.
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“The most
basic articles in English in these topic areas tend to be very high quality, so it’s
more common for Wikipedias in emerging languages to go to those areas for
more direct, traditional translation.” Walsh also points out that the projects that
have been around the longest—those in languages like English, French,
German, and Spanish—tend to have the more detailed and higher-quality
articles that end up getting translated into projects for languages that are
younger to Wikipedia. “We need more participants in less represented
languages online, particularly as we see a sharp increase in the number of
people coming online from non-English-speaking countries, particularly the

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global south,” he remarks. Indeed, unique visitor data from third-party
comScore shows a significant increase in Wikipedia’s traffic in the global
south, which typically refers to developing countries in the Southern
Hemisphere.
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What does it take for Wikipedia to get a new language off the
ground? Language communities within Wikipedia generally want to create
their own projects in their own languages. Using automatic translation tools to
translate content from other Wikipedias is possible but does not always work
very well. “Efforts to machine-translate Wikipedia articles and then bring in
volunteers to build on top of those machine translations have not been