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Goal! Gol! гол! Hadaf! - Football fans around the globe break down language barriers
Friday, June 11, 2010
Football is one of the truly global languages. Throughout the decades, fans have cheered, argued and shared tears as their teams have swept to victory with a wonder-goal in extra-time, or crumbled under the pressure of a penalty shootout. While emotions etched onto the faces of spectators are all too easy to read, verbally communicating across languages can be difficult. The BBC World Service now offers a way to break down these language barriers through
World Cup Team Talk
, which uses Google’s machine translation technology.
Back in March, the BBC World Service
launched an experiment
using Google Translate to explore the transformative power of the Internet and facilitate real-time discussion across languages. On
SuperPower Nation Day
, BBC World Service readers from around the world were invited to discuss the Nation Day event online—and have their comments translated live for others to read.
Although translations were not always perfect, people found the project useful and engaging—and its success inspired the BBC World Service to run another campaign to allow football fans from across the globe to join in conversation around the
beautiful game
.
Starting on June 11, football fans across the world will be able to contribute to a global conversation in 11 languages—Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Vietnamese and Welsh—and receive replies from fellow fans that are automatically translated back into their native language by Google Translate. The posts will also appear on an interactive map so people can see where in the world the contributions are coming from.
On the other side of the pond,
the Boston Globe
has
integrated Google Translate
into each article on its
Corner Kicks
soccer blog to extend the site’s reach across a multi-lingual readership, locally in New England and worldwide.
The Globe
is no stranger to translation tools. Its award-winning photography blog
The Big Picture
also uses Google Translate for automatically translating summaries and captions and for approving comments from around the world, including its
introduction to the World Cup
.
With that, let the games begin—
in whatever language you want
.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
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