Formation March 2007 Parent organization Global Voices Online | Area served Global Volunteers 570 | |
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Purpose Open lines of communication with non-english speaking bloggers by translating articles from Global Voices Online Official language Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Aymara, Bangla, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Czech, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Farsi, French, Filipino, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Malagasy, Macedonian, Odia, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Urdu | ||
Project Lingua is an online translation community formed in 2007 with the goal of translating articles from the global citizen media project Global Voices Online from English into other languages, opening lines of communication between bloggers across the world. The project currently translates into 40 different languages, and incorporates an estimated active 570 volunteer translators and translation editors. Along with the Cucumis project and the Wikipedia's own translation projects in every language, such as the Wikipedia:ECHO, Project Lingua is considered one of the largest volunteer-based online translation communities in the world.
Contents
Origin of the Project
Project Lingua began as a community-based initiative by Taiwanese blogger Portnoy Zheng, who started translating Global Voices articles into Chinese as early as September, 2005. This initial idea became a project of its own at the Global Voices Summit in December 2006, where it was given the name "Lingua".
The first official Lingua sites, launched by June 2007, were Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Bangla, Farsi, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The project has since grown rapidly in size and scope, having 35 sites active as of June 2013. Global Voices is translated in all the top Languages used on the Internet but also include under-represent and indigenous languages, such as Aymara.
Some sites have been started but lack volunteers to take off. Among inactive languages as of August 2012 are Amharic, Burmese, Hebrew, Hindi. Translators apply via the Translation Application Form.
Collaborations
Project Lingua has content-sharing/partnerships (formal and informal) with news sites and other online organizations, such as:
Project Lingua has also partnered with like minded organisations to provide translations. In August 2012, Project Lingua launched a collaborative effort to translate the Declaration of Internet Freedom providing the text in 31 languages.