“I felt part of the Netroots experience even from afar”
How translating #NN16 to Spanish helped expand the Netroots audience, all the way to Argentina
This year, Meedan and Global Voices teamed up to translate #NN16 Tweets to Spanish. With this year’s focus on inclusion and racial justice, we were excited to make many of the Tweets accessible to those who only speak or prefer to speak Spanish.
Working with 5 volunteer translators from Global Voices Lingua and a volunteer from the University of New Mexico, we did the following:
- With Bridge, our platform for social media translation, volunteer translators selected social media during the conference. They selected Tweets by relevance/interestingness plus a look at what was trending in the hashtag.
- The translations appeared on a simple landing page that showed all the translated Tweets.
- And to ensure the translations fed back into social media, where they would be relevant and engaging, we set up @netroots_es, where folks could follow along directly.
And what did we learn?
On first impression, there were a lot of impressions.
Translated Tweets accounted for almost 40,000 impressions over the three days we did translations. That’s thanks to 5 volunteer translators, who took turns jumping into the feed. They came from places like Catamarca, Buenos Aires and other cities in Argentina; Lima, Peru; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In general, more than 70% of translations were made within 30 minutes of the Tweet being published. This sped up during some of the peak times, and just under 50% were made within 10 minutes.
Translation created a new form of community engagement.
Importantly, this was also a way for translators themselves to feel engaged as a part of the community even from so far away — and for community members to show their appreciation.
“Many people were glad that we got to translate their tweets,” noted translator Paula Mascheroni, “which expressed such important feelings about our present and concerns about our future. I felt part of the Netroots experience even from afar.”
“I felt part of the Netroots experience even from afar,” said translator Paula Mascheroni.
María Romina Mascareño also pointed out, “It was exciting to see the live streaming of my translations, and to be able to participate despite the distance. It wasn’t difficult to translate the Tweets, but there were moments when several Tweets appeared at the same time, and I had to choose between the popular ones.”
Interestingly, these translations become a way of learning, too, and educating others: “I dedicated myself to translate Tweets mainly on experiences and tactics of resistance of USA’s black communities, which is not well known on this side of the world where we mostly receive just news of the protests,” explained Juan Arellano, who was translating from Peru. “Also to know a little about Netroots Nation, an event I did not know of its existence and that now I would like to attend in its next edition.”
Follower growth had a limited impact.
We grew 26 followers during the pilot. We expected a relatively small number, given that the conference was being held in a region with a smaller number of Latinos than last year, when the conference was held in Phoenix. Searching the #nn15 hashtag (i.e., Netroots Nation conversations from last year) showed there was a substantial existing Spanish-language conversation on the hashtag.
Compare this, for instance, to the growth of followers and engagement during RightsCon, a conference with an active multilingual presence online, in the link below. This suggests that multilingual communities grow and foster over time, and we’re excited to think about what this might look like for the Netroots Nation community in the long term:
All this said, we received a number of excited and positive responses from followers, who were happy to see Tweets being translated. And overall, 100% of translators who participated found the app easy to use, which was great news.
As always, we learned a lot from translating #NN16 and we’re keen to make improvements, both on the technology and process side. We were encouraged by the results and are eager to translate more conferences.
If you’re interested in trying out Bridge for your conference, please get in touch via hello@speakbridge.io or @speakbridge.
written by An Xiao Mina
