infundibulum

I’ve been following the story about Microsoft’s latest adventure in China with some interest, but it really wasn’t until I read the latest post at Global Voices that I saw that this story is directly related to a topic I’ve been sort of obsessed with lately, what I think of as “ the wall of translation .”

If you missed the story, basically what’s happened is that Microsoft is cooperating with China’s censorship of MSN Spaces blogs and blocking words like “democracy” and “human rights” in the way some blogging systems block words like “fuck.”

I’m glad mine doesn’t.

Anyway, what I mean by the “ wall of translation ” is that this is a story where a dialog could take place on a large scale between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking bloggers (or speakers of any language, really), if there were an effective mechanism for that translation to take place.

But the conversation hits a wall, because the connections and routines that make translation happen aren’t public.

Presumably some day machine translation will solve that problem. But that day isn’t today. And despite what Google says, I don’t think it’s going to come within in the next few years.

People need to think about this problem, a lot, because it must be solved.

I think about it.

A lot.