Among those cute stories and political jokes, though, you often find more disturbing things – for example, videos translated from Arabic by organizations like Memri, highlighting the latest outrageous statements by Islamic fanatics. Those videos are a window into the staple ideological fare of tens of millions of Muslims, and realizing that they probably represent the beliefs of nations and cultures throughout the Muslim world is, to say the least, scary.

We take it for granted that Israel always gets the short end of the stick in social media – that “they” hate us regardless of what we say, that our hasbara (pro-Israel public pronouncements) is second-rate anyway, etc. But interestingly, whenever MEMRI posts a video with translations on the bottom, allowing English speakers to understand what is really going on in the “mysterious Orient,” everyone suddenly understands the problem and danger: The talkbacks (sometimes thousands of them, when taken as a single unit) make it clear that lots of people, not just those who love Israel, are scared. And Muslims who do not subscribe to the “Down with Israel/America” philosophy and tactics espoused by these imams suddenly appear, posting messages and counter-videos showing the rational side of Islam. Why we don’t hear from them more often is a question we can’t deal with here, but suffice to say that when the fanatics decide to go after the “kaffir” (heretics against Islam) of the world, they usually start by “cleaning house” – ie, going after the Muslims they aren’t fond of.

What works on the negative side – showing the true face of radical Islam – can work on the positive side as well, showing the positive side of Israel. While there are many pro-Israel videos on Youtube, there are so many positive, untold stories that have never been told – possibly because those telling them don’t know English, or don’t have the “connections” to get their story out to the Youtube world. In a world of homogenized milk and homogenized fast food, language is the last barrier to getting your message out to the masses. Thousands of years later, the “curse of Babel” is still with us, and for thousands of years, the only to make yourself understood was to hire a professional translator, who knew the language of the people you were trying to reach.

Slowly but surely, that last roadblock to human understanding is disappearing, thanks to innovative web services that are bringing speakers of different tongues together. Google Translate, for example, lets you type in text or paste a URL into its translation box, and seconds later, you get a direct translation of your text in one of several dozen languages – or, a fully translated web page. As I’ve written previously, the translations aren’t always perfect, but if you paste the URL of an Arabic language news page into Google Translate, you’ll get a passable English translation of the page (sans, of course, proper grammar, in most cases. But who worries about grammar these days anyway?)

Text translations, while far from easy, are infinitely less complicated than audio translations. Accents, dialects, and the quality of elocution of speakers makes writing standard translations software nearly impossible, with applications needing major component additions for each specific language. That’s not stopping Google from trying, though, and one of the result of the company’s stated desire to make all knowledge accessible to all people is the new Youtube Transcribe Audio feature. Google doesn’t really have an audio site of its own, but it does own Youtube, and almost videos have sound. And when you combine Google Translate technology with audi transcription, you get either a window onto the world – with an automatic English (or other language) text translation of what you are hearing  – or, in some cases, a really funny story!

That’s because the service is still in beta, and clearly is going to be an ongoing project for awhile. Even the automatic transcription of audio in the same language (English voiceover to english text) isn’t always successful, but Google gets lots of credit for at least getting the ball rolling. When you load a Youtube video like this one, you may see a box on the bottom right of the video marked “CC” – which stands for “closed caption,” a caption generated by Youtube of the voice on the video. Hover your mouse over that box, and you’ll see a selection for “Translate captions,” which gives you a list of dozens of languages to translate the captions into. Magically, the captions change into something you can understand (more or less – try it on the above video and you’ll see what I mean!).

The criteria for being chosen for a transcribe/translate job aren’t clear, but the videos I found that do have them were mostly interviews, such as the one listed. And not all of the interviewees are as intelligent as the guy in that video, believe me – some of them are of the type that gave Youtube its reputation as the “black hole” of internet time wasting. So, if you want your inspiring Israeli story to be seen and read without Hebrew being a barrier to the viewer, check out dotSUB, a site that makes transcription and translation as easy as feasibly possible. Using dotSUB’s convenient tools, you can quickly and easily enter the transcribed text in your language, and then do the same for the translation. You can them download the finished product and upload it to Youtube, confident that you’ve got a first-class translation, all laid out with properly placed captions – ready to win the hearts and minds of the people “out there.”

Related articles

• Google Translate Conversation Mode (searchengineland.com)
• Google Can Translate Poetry (googletutor.com)
• How Google Translate Works (mt-soft.com.ar)
• dotSUB: Spread your message into other languages (socialmedia.biz)

And unfortunately, that goes double for Wikipedia’s Arabic language version. What an opportunity to break down stereotypes and promote understanding between strangers, even enemies – and they’re blowing it!

Unfortunately, if we are counting on the “brand name” of Wikipedia to help break down barriers and stereotypes, the site has a lot of work to do, it seems. Wikipedia, with its over 10 million articles (there are only 500,000 in the Encyclopedia Brittanica), is quickly becoming the de facto place to look for information, almost anywhere there is an internet; increasingly, the Wikipedia entry comes up first when you Google for information about almost anything these days.

How does Wikipedia make sure it stays more or less accurate? Through “peer-editing”; it is assumed that when inaccurate information is listed in an article, someone will come in and correct it, or at least present an opposing point of view (http://tinyurl.com/fccjr). According to the site, thousands of articles have been amended or rewritten since Wikipedia came into being on 2001, thus proving the validity of the system.

But what happens when you have a society that has a very definite set of “everybody knows” beliefs – where inaccuracies and outright lies plague Wikipedia articles, but no one does anything about it, because everyone believes them? If somebody writes that the earth is flat in an article, and all the peers believe that the earth is flat, then readers who are counting on the information in Wikipedia are going to read that the earth is flat, and that’s all they’re going to hear. So the system isn’t foolproof.

Unfortunately, this “what if” scenario is not theoretical, but what actually happens on pages I checked out in the Arabic language version of Wikipedia (http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki). Many Westerners get nervous when they see Arabic writing, like there must be some terrorist-oriented message embedded in the text; but thanks to the miracle of Google Translations (http://translate.google.com/translate_t#), Arabic, along with dozens of other languages, no longer need be a mystery. While clearly not professional translations, Google returns a good enough rendering of a page that (usually) gives you a pretty clear picture of what the site in question is trying to say.

I don’t read or speak Arabic, but thanks to Google Translations, I’m able to get a much better insight into the point of view of Arabic speakers online. My method: Type in a search term at the translation site, then copy the resulting Arabic characters and do a Google search for them, then click on the “translate this page” link on results.

Using this method to Google for “hot-button” items like Israel, Jew, Zionism, etc., returns results like you would unfortunately expect, in many cases. Which is what led me to Wikipedia. Interestingly, in Arabic language Google searches, Wikipedia entries were usually at the top of the list, too. That’s good, I thought – wouldn’t Arabic language Wikipedia pages be translations of English language pages on the same subject? Not that I’m such a fan of Wikipedia’s point of view on Israel and Jewish-oriented issues, but it’s a lot more palatable than what many of the “native” Arabic sites present.

But it turns out that Arabic Wikipedia (AW) is not necessarily a translation of English language Wikipedia (EW). While as I mentioned, the Google Translation rendering of these pages is clearly not totally accurate, the discrepancies between AW and EW were so great that you quickly realize that the two versions have very little to do with each other, at least on the hot-button issues. Which to me is a major problem; Wikipedia is such an authority today that if a Wikipedia page says, for example, that the Haganah’s fighting against Arab villages in Palestine before the establishment of Israel is a “genocide,” akin to the Holocaust or the genocide in Rwanda, how can we be surprised when kids in Ramallah, Jenin or Gaza rally behind suicide bombers who wantonly kill Israeli women and children? Wouldn’t we have been happy if Polish Jews conducted an “intifada” against the Nazis? (Note that there is a separate AW page titled “Gaza Holocaust,” referring to a battle in Gaza in March of this year, in which Hamas said 116 Gaza residents were killed).

Of course, you won’t find a hint on AW of what was well documented by the Haganah during the War of Liberation – how residents of these Arab villages actively took part in the war, giving themselves the status of combatants, or how the vast majority ran away when told to do so by the Arab armies invading the newly established state of Israel, the better to clear out and give the Arab Legion a clear field to perpetrate a genocide of their own, against the Jews. Of course, one man’s terror attack is another’s “freedom fight,” as the old saying goes, but you have to really be out there in anti-Israel land to claim that the Haganah conducted a near-genocide against anyone, especially given the well-known and time-and-again proven historical facts.

Among the historic genocides listed on the AW page are the Cambodian genocide, the Rwanda genocide, “French massacres in Algeria from 1830 to 1962” (more about that later), the “Armenian genocide,” (ditto), and others. The next paragraph on this page reads: “Human history has witnessed several cases of mass murder, but the debate is the use of the term genocide by around the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, because this group is the core purpose of genocide, but difficult to demonstrate.” Listed here is “Mongol invasion of Baghdad,” “Annihilation of Native Americans (Indians),” and – “Massacres against the Palestinians by gangs Haganah Jewish at the beginning of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

Politics, of course, plays heavily on anything having to do with Jerusalem, and the AW page on the city makes for interesting reading. Prominent on the AW page, for example, are references to “the Judaization of Jerusalem.” The introductory line says “Jerusalem is the largest city of historic Palestine under Israeli control today,” and the city’s status “as the capital of a  Palestinian state within a Palestinian declaration of independence,” is the second sentence, while Security Council 476 and 478 are the context for the mention of the city as Israel’s capital (the resolutions condemned Israel’s unification of the city). Interestingly, the history of Jerusalem on the AW and EW pages are quite different, with Canaanites and Egyptians stressed far more strongly on the AW page (the “debate” link on this page makes clear why).

As far as the entry for Jews goes, the article seemed pretty balanced, except for a comparison of Purim to Halloween (wearing costumes and getting drunk), and of Chanukah to Christmas (gift giving) – false stereotypes Western Jews worked hard to debunk. That, and a discussion as to how the Jews and the Children of Israel are not the same entity (not very clear, but appears to be not very complimentary). Plus, a reference to “Aerosmith: Crazy,” which I always thought was a song by that rock group, but turns out to be, when you click on the link, a discussion of a heavy Quranic concept! The entry on Israel recited the country’s familiar history, but key elements (“In 1947, the world witnessed the partition of Palestine, which gave the Jews living in Palestine 55% of the land, when they accounted for 30% of the population”) are just plain wrong.

Besides issues that concern us, Wikipedia gives us an insight into how Arabs see their own history. There is no reference to a century of French genocide in Algeria in EW, but there is a page dedicated to the Sétif massacre, in which French troops shot and killed Algerian rioters (as few as 1,100, or as many as 45,000, depending on who you believe). Most interesting was the AW entry on the Armenian genocide, compared to the EW entry. On the AW page, it appears as if the Armenians were in league with the Russians to fight the Ottoman Turks, and the Armenians died in the general starvation of World War I, like everyone else (ie, there was no “genocide,” and even if there was, the Armenians had it coming, because they acted like “a fifth column” in Turkey, armed by the Russians). The EW page on this subject has the more familiar version of an organized extermination of the Armenians.

The disparity between the two versions is really wide – which means that one of the Wikipedias isn’t getting the story right. I could go on, but you get the idea. Like a Tower of Babel, Wikipedia aims to build a body of knowledge that all humanity can benefit from. But if we’re not speaking the same language – figuratively and intellectually, not just literally – what chance do we have of making that happen? And should Wikipedia be lending its authoritative name to the process?

It doesn’t always work out that way. Even speakers of Esperanto, that world language unifier, are known to have differing, irreconcilable opinions at times. Esperanto, by the way, is alive and well, with as many as a million people worldwide speaking it. There’s even a site where you can learn it online (for free): http://en.lernu.net/, with lessons, forums, books, stories and even jokes in Esperanto. Interestingly, the site makes a point of saying that “people of many different ages and cultures use this website. Therefore, we ask that you always be tolerant and polite in your communications with other lernu! users.” And if the enlightened Esperanto folk can’t get along, what choice do the rest of us Neanderthals have? Not much, I guess. But it’s still a good idea to get a to know what the other guy – or the other side – is saying.

Any Israeli has got to wonder what they’re saying in Arabic. For many Israelis, anything in Arabic – in voice or in print – sounds threatening. We think that “they’re” always plotting against us, and that everything written in Arabic newspapers is an accusation against us, or even a blood libel. It just looks and sounds so – well, alien!

Given the political situation, it’s understandable why many Israelis (and Westerners, for that matter) would feel this way. And there’s no question that lots of what is written about Israel and Jews in Arabic newspapers, magazines and web sites is less than complimentary, shall we say. But we’re not always on the front pages of their publications – and they have plenty of beefs with others or among themselves that have nothing to do with us. And the entire idea of labeling a large group of hundreds of millions of people as “they” or “them” is ridiculous, anyway. There are hundreds or thousands of subgroups and subcultures among every large (and not so large) group – and the Arabs and/or Muslims are no different. To us, they seem a large, mostly unified mass, with their chief preoccupation the destruction of Israel and/or Western culture that threatens their way of life. Would we still feel that way if we could actually read what they wrote for “internal consumption” – or if we could communicate to them in their own language?

Maybe; my job is to ask the big questions, not answer them! The only way to find out is to actually read what they say in the Arab press and on Arabic language forums and web sites. No doubt you have read newspaper stories in local papers quoting from this London-based Arabic daily or that Jordanian or Egyptian semi-official weekly. While once you had to know a language well in order to understand pieces in such publications, the Internet today offers several options to enable you to understand those stories, using translation services by Microsoft, Google and others.

There Google goes again, opening up the world’s information sources to the common person. If you’ve never given Google’s translation engine a whirl, you must check it out. Some non-English language pages you come across on Google searches have a link that says “translate this page;” this is where they do it. The Google engine can translate to or from 25 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, and some “easier” ones, like Spanish and Italian, too (no Hebrew, though). You can paste text into the page’s translation box (it will even try to figure out what the language is if you aren’t sure) and display it in a language you can understand. Or, you can type in a URL, and the page will come up with its contents translated!

You might not always get proper sentence structure or grammar, although the translations into English do come out quite readable, from the pages in Arabic and Chinese that I converted. If you really do want to check out the Arabic press, you can use this site, which has links to Arabic language publications throughout the world (including the ones in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia). I decided to check out an article at random from an Arabic language publication in Jaffa, called Al-Sabar. Putting the link into the Google engine, I got a reasonably understandable translation of the article – which turned out to be about the ongoing feud between Daniel Friedman and Aharon Barak, translated from a piece by an Israeli writer!

There are also several applications that make use of the Google engine to provide translations. One of the best I’ve come across is the Translate.net application, a free download that you use as your desktop translator based on not only the Google engine, but over two dozen other online translation services as well. The program will automatically choose the service, depending on what you’re translating; you tell it the subject matter of the translation – business, science, law, banking, etc. – and Translate.net finds the the right service with the right words for you.

Also highly recommended is FoxLingo, downloaded over a million times already (three times by me!). This one (for Firefox users only, so far) makes use of 35 online translators – it handles Hebrew as well – and lets you choose between the translations services, automatically translating a page upon request when you surf to it. FoxLingo lets you make some interesting comparisons, like which service – Google’s or Microsoft’s Live Translation – is more understandable. All of the 41 “foreign” languages handled by FoxLingo can be translated into English, and many of the key languages for Israelis interested in regional events – Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Russian, as well as Japanese, Korean, Ukranian, and most Western European languages can be translated in Hebrew as well. There are even applications now that will automatically translate SMS messages between writers of different languages: You write to them in English, and they see it in Spanish! Check out http://www.speaklike.com and http://home.transclick.com/ for some examples.

We’re not professional translators here – although if you were, you could go to http://www.proz.com/ and sign up to do some professional translations for a fee (or get someone to do some professional translating for you) – but that’s a story for another day. The translations offered by the free online services and applications (both Translate.net and FoxLingo are free) aren’t perfect, but they’re enough to give you a good understanding of what your neighbors are reading. What we’ll find when we figure out what they’re reading is something else.