Join the Bridge Community — and Help Diversify Social Media in the News
Bridge enables teams to quickly translate public social media content and add important cultural, social and political notes to facilitate understanding and build connections across language divides.
We are always seeking to grow our community of volunteer translators as we beta test Bridge. We are especially interested in people who are proficient in multiple languages (English being one of them) and are up-to-date with news events, public debates and social media discussions in their local contexts.
Activists, bloggers, journalists or people who are passionate about social media and information sharing are welcomed to join our network to help us grow our reach and bring out more unrepresented voices and issues from around the globe.
Why volunteer as a Bridge translator?
- You will become part of a team of translators, journalists and concerned people who believe in and are actively working for a more accessible, crosslingual, crosscultural web.
- You will facilitate bringing more international attention to issues and causes that the media ignored or is unable to cover because of linguistic and cultural barriers.
- You will learn more about “crowdsourced journalism”, an innovative and collaborative style increasingly used by media organizations to produce their stories.
- You will have the chance to be involved in and trained on the use of a new and promising technology, while practicing your translation skills.
In its beta stage, Bridge has worked on translating news events in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Mexico, Guatemala, China and Spain. Bridge translators do more than just translate social media — they offer a foreign reader more context and sources (when needed) to add flavor and insight into local knowledge. By engaging with Bridge, you support the efforts to raise up marginal and unheard stories and hopefully drive critical conversations in media and politics.
In the past few years we have witnessed the power of social media not only in education, information sharing, and movements of protest but also in the process of news making. More and more media organizations are using crowdsourced journalism to come up with stories, to offer a variety of opinions and personal experiences, and to engage with audiences. We believe that technology and language access offer very good ways for people to participate in crafting their own stories. We welcome you to be part of that.
Languages We Support
Bridge supports eight languages right now, those are: Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Tagalog. Given that Bridge is still in its testing phases we are currently focused on Arabic, Spanish and Chinese languages as those are the languages our current staff and partners are proficient in. This allows us to work closely, support our community and also test any recurring issues or bugs with Bridge. That said, we encourage speakers of the above languages to reach out for potential testing — or to get in touch if you’d like to see another language supported!
Have a great idea for social media translation? Have a team of translators or want to get in touch with potential translators for your project? Download Bridge now and get in touch via email (hello@speakbridge.io) or Twitter (@speakbridge). We look forward to hearing from you!
