Project Lingua - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Project Lingua is an online translation community formed in 2007 with the goal of translating articles from the global citizen media

Citizen media

The term citizen media refers to forms of content produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles.-Principles of citizen media:...

project Global Voices Online

Global Voices Online

Global Voices Online is an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists that follow, report, and summarizes what is going on in the blogosphere in every corner of the world...

from English into other languages, opening lines of communication between bloggers across the world. The project currently translates into 30 different languages, and incorporates an estimated 300 volunteer translators and translation editors. Along with the Cucumis

Cucumis (website)

Cucumis is a website where translators share their linguistic knowledge and exchange services online. One unusual feature of Cucumis is that all translations are peer reviewed and may be edited by other Cucumis translators...

project and the Wikipedia's own translation projects in every language, such as the Wikipedia:ECHO, Project Lingua is considered one of the largest volunteer-based online translation communities in the world.

Origin of the Project

Project Lingua began as a community-based initiative by Taiwanese blogger Portnoy Zheng, who started translating Global Voices articles into Chinese as early as September, 2005. This initial idea became a project of its own at the Global Voices Summit in December 2006, where it was given the name "Lingua". The first official Lingua sites, launched by June 2007, were Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Bangla, Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The project has since grown rapidly in size and scope. As of November 2008, there were 16 languages. More language groups are upcoming, including Dutch, Indonesian, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Swahili, and Urdu. As of May 2011, there were 30 languages, including rare ones, such as Aymara.

Collaborations

Project Lingua has content-sharing/link partnerships (formal and informal) with news sites and other online organizations, such as:

Arabic: Al Jazeera Talk
Bangla: Biborton Bangla (news/entertainment site, literary magazine)
Chinese: China Times
China Times
The China Times is a newspaper published in the Republic of China in Traditional Chinese. It is one of the four biggest newspapers in Taiwan, the other three being the Liberty Times, United Daily News, and Apple Daily ....

, Memedia ("Strawberry") (news site), Peopo (Taiwanese citizen news site hosted by the Taiwan Broadcasting Service)
Italian: Agoravox Italia, Rainews24
French: Rue 89
Rue 89
Rue89 is a French news website. It was officially launched on 6 May 2007, on the day of the second round of the French presidential election. Its news editor is Pascal Riché, former Op-ed editor of Libération, and its chief editor...

, Cucumis
Cucumis (website)
Cucumis is a website where translators share their linguistic knowledge and exchange services online. One unusual feature of Cucumis is that all translations are peer reviewed and may be edited by other Cucumis translators...

, Rezo.net
Portuguese: Google News Portuguese / Google Notícias Brasil and Mozambican newspaper A Verdade
Spanish: Canal Solidario , Google News Spanish / Google Noticias España, Periodismo Ciudadano

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.