Polyglott Net: Activisme cartographique - Cartógrafos alternativos

The polyglot Internet is potentially possible, but often limited by its language barriers. A tiny percentage of the Internet content is translated. While famous US American blogs are read worldwide, Chinese, German, French or Indonesian blogs are often not noticed outside of their countries.

There is an interesting presentation from Ethan Zuckerman at TED, where he describes that we are too often "stuck" in our own language domain even though there are so many opportunities to read information or news from different countries, beyond our own. Still, automatic translation is improving year-by-year and many translators worldwide help to bridge the language gap.

Therefore, I was glad to see that a recent German article I wrote about Maptivism in the magazine Kulturaustausch, which was also published on the Kooptech Blog, has been picked by the European blog portal Wikio and translated into four different languages. (All my blog posts on Maptivism)

• Alternative surveyors – mapping activism worldwide
• Cartógrafos alternativos: activismo internacional para crear mapas
• Maptivism : l’activisme cartographique
• Cartografia alternativa: mappe digitali e attivismo per cambiare il mondo

Wikio is a project meant to be a laboratory reflecting the European civil society. It takes posts from European bloggers and translates them into various European languages. Thanks a lot to the translator(s) for their work. A nice project walking in the footsteps of the bridge blogging platform Global Voices. By the way I blog now from time to time at Kooptech to bridge blog some interesting stories from English to German.