Iran Elections: Join the Meedan translators newsroom
DWH9072393 from Flickr.com uploaded 14 June 2009.
We are looking for Farsi translators to take the extraordinary use of social media over the Iran elections aftermath to a new level.
We want to translate tweets, blogs and videos so that they are available across the web.
To do this, we’ve started twitter account @farsitrans This will be an account for subscribing to farsi twitterers from Iran, and also an account for a translating and ReTweeting [trans]RT Farsi posts into English, or, English posts into Farsi. (And yes, we did think about trying to standardize TRT as “Translated ReTweet”– but decided to test just one innovation at a time).
Here is what you can do to help:
1. Push out word to any vetted Farsi translators who are willing to help the effort to email farsitrans (at) meedan.net or info (at) meedan.net or tweet to @meedan or @farsitrans
2. Subscribe to @farsitrans
3. Push any Farsi Tweet or URL you think should be translated to @farsitrans with hashtag #translate
4. Push any eloquent/important/vetted farsi twitterers to @farsitrans with hashtag #follow eg “@farsitrans @Gonahkar #follow”
Of course, we encourage bi-lingual twitter users to simply use the convention [trans]RT and hashtag #farsitrans or #meedan to begin scaling real time communications between these language groups.
This is a citizen driven effort with Meedan team members helping to coordinate – this is also us trying to invent ways of using Twitter in a real-time emerging situation. We will keep evolving our strategy and will hope that we can share some compelling Farsi voices with the English and Arabic speaking communities on the web.
Remember, you can post any translated blog posts onto our live blog on Meedan and we’ll tweet this out too. And, we will point out that the HuffingtonPost’s Nico Pitney is doing a remarkable job of liveblogging IranElection--do bookmark Nico’s page.
Come and join the team and help us learn more about what is going on in Iran right now.
