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George at the Meedan Blog explains why it is important for social web projects in the Middle East to be bi-lingual: Arabic is the language of the vast majority of the more than forty million Arab web users in the Middle East.
That’s why Meedan is teaming up with Sharik 961 – a group of Lebanese nonprofits, development practitioners, media people, and techies – to help monitor the Lebanese elections on June 7.
The project, which will use the Ushahidi crisis-monitoring platform, will enable Lebanese voters to collaborate with a wide network of interested communities on the web to track reports from the ballot box.
There’s absolutely no doubt translation is key to this
– which partly explains why Vote Report India struggled to draw a wider set of reports on the recent Indian elections.
I have been almost too transparent in discussing the successes and failures of Vote Report India in public and I can assure you, George, that language wasn’t a problem for Vote Report India.
I have written before that language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian) will be the three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites. However, English is still the preferred language for most of India’s 50 million internet users and almost 92% of all Indian blogs we analyzed for the recent State of the Indian Blogosphere Report were in English. Clearly, it’s still OK to launch your Indian social web project only in English.
I’m sure Middle East is different and I’m happy that Meedan and Sharik961 are working together on doing an Arabic translation of the election reporting platform. However, I can assure you that, even in Lebanon, the key to the success of Sharik961 won’t be the language options on the website.
The key for Sharik961 will be to promote its SMS code enough to preclude the need for users to visit its website to report incidents, or failing that, to tie up with civil society organizations with on-ground presence who will use the platform to directly report irregularities.
My biggest lesson from Vote Report India was that it’s not enough to build a great website, you also need to build offline support for digital civil society initiatives to succeed. I’m hoping that Sharek961 will focus on the right priorities so that it doesn’t have to learn the same lesson all over again.
Update: Thank you, Meedan, for updating the original post and linking to this post in a follow-up. I agree that doing an Arabic translation for Sharik961 will help build offline support for it.
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