Beyond “Please fondle my buttocks”

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:31:00 +0000

Tens of thousands of people around the Middle East read Ali Abdulemam's online discussion forum every day. Yet few Westerners knew that authorities in Bahrain detained Abdulemam over his Web site for two weeks in early March; although his detention sparked local protests, the story didn't grab much attention beyond the Arab world. Westerners who don't understand Arabic can't read the controversial posts (which criticized the government's treatment of the Shiite majority), nor can they read Abdulemam's personal blog, a firsthand look at life in the Middle East.

Current technology lets bloggers around the world make their voices heard, but only to a degree. If a blogger speaks Arabic and a reader speaks English, or vice versa, it doesn't matter how fast or how global the Internet is. A blogger and reader who can't understand each other might as well be living in the days of the Pony Express.

To push the frontier of cross-cultural communication and bridge the gap in understanding between citizens of the United States and the Middle East, some pioneers have called for an enhancement of blogging technology, suggesting that machine translation software might be able to crack the language barrier.

Salon.com > Lauren Aaronson

Beyond “Please fondle my buttocks”