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November 06, 2009
Meedan - Open Access Arabic/English Translation Memory
Meedan Releases the World's First Open Access Arabic/English Translation Memory
5 November, 2009: San Francisco, United States and Toronto, Canada
Today, Meedan, is releasing the first publicly available open licensed Arabic/English Translation Memory (TM). This release comes as a part of Meedan's ongoing commitment to improving the state of Arabic language machine processing research and supporting translators and machine translation researchers.
The new translation memory, called MeedanMemory, contains around one million words in aligned Arabic and English sentence pairs. It constitutes an invaluable resource for translation professionals, Arabic linguistic researchers, academics and volunteer communities, and is the first translation memory of such size and sophistication to be released under an open access license.
MeedanMemory is packaged as a standards-compliant Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) file, which facilitates its integration with most computer assisted translation tools and translation memory managers.
Professional translators can utilize MeedanMemory to support their translation work and improving its efficiency, and to increase consistency and quality in the translation outcome. Researchers can use this resource in designing and implementing their research activities into Arabic computer linguistics and machine language processing, which will lead to the development of better text search engines and document analysis tools and applications. And community organizations, non-profits and volunteer communities can leverage MeedanMemory to facilitate translation between Arabic and English of the content they produce for lower costs, lower turnaround times and higher quality.
The MeedanMemory is released under the Open Database License, which permits the use, copy and distribution of the translation memory, produce work using it, and to modify, transform and build upon the translation memory.
Meedan is pleased to announce this first release of MeedanMemory, and will continue to release data generated from the Meedan translation community into this open repository. We also hope that other organizations will contribute to the growth of this unique and valuable resource for the Arabic language and Arabic digital content that holds great potential for supporting Arabic content projects and initiatives.
To download your copy of MeedanMemory, please visit: http://github.com/anastaw/Meedan-Memory
For more information about MeedanMemory, please contact: info@meedan.net
Meedan Cross-language Arabic-English Social Networking: beta.meedan.net
About Meedan:
Meedan (Arabic for ‘town square') is a social media and technology non-profit. Our mission is to promote the exchange of knowledge, media, and conversations across linguistic and cultural divides, with an initial focus on Arabic-English collaborations. We serve end-users interested in media exchange through our public-facing http://beta.meedan.net site, and we provide a social networking, knowledge exchange, and web-based translation platform to a network of NGO partners. The Meedan project was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2006. Based in San Francisco, our distributed team of Meedanis contribute engineering, design, and translation services to our project from Cairo, Damascus, London, Beirut, the West Bank, Doha, Gaza, Jeddah, Rabat, Amman, Toronto, and Portland.
Meedan is a leading advocate for open linguistic data and open source tools and is innovating approaches to social translation, data aggregation, data visualization, and tagging in the context of Arab Region use cases.
Posted by kpfister at November 6, 2009 04:32 PM
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