# Posted 10:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

OPEN QUESTION TO READERS AND THE BLOGOSPHERE: We've all been following lately the efforts of Juan Cole and other like-minded folk to increase the quantity of western political discourse, both historical and contemporary, that's available in Arabic. There have also been a number of websites coming online lately - such as Babel Fish and Ajeeb - that have the capacity to translate automatically online text. These translation engines certainly don't provide perfect translations, but generally give ones that are competent enough to comprehend the meaning of the original text.

So my question is, does anyone out there have any ideas about how we might generate automatic Arabic (or Chinese, Farsi, Russian, or even Spanish and French) translations of English-language blogs from across the political spectrum? A number of writers have noticed a great thirst for political information and commentary in the Middle East, China, Russia, and other areas suffering under illiberal governance, and even in Latin America and francophone Africa it seems to me that making the American political debate readily available would increase understanding both of the United States and of the breadth of opinion within it.

I've been experimenting with Altavista's Babel Fish translation site (which offers Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French translation), and while it thought our foreign policy society was a "cerveza inglesa," and couldn't even load OxBlog, InstaPundit, or Robert Tagorda, it did a fairly good job in translating both Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. My conclusion is that it must only read left-of-center blogs.

If anyone has ideas about whether this idea might be feasible, and how we might go about making it happen, I'd really love to hear from you. For my part I'm happy to help out however I can, and if it's helpful, our foreign policy society would be very happy, for instance, to host mirror sites of blogs from across the political spectrum on our server. Please let me know your ideas!

UPDATE: This has generated a lot of interest already, which I'm very grateful for. I think that one promising idea may be to rely on a handful of volunteer translators to translate into Arabic and Farsi a "best of the web" roundup, which would represent blogs from across the spectrum, and could appear, say, once or twice a week. For my part I'd be very happy to create a movable type blog for the purpose. I'd be very interested in hearing from any of our readers who speak Arabic or Farsi, and who might be willing to help translate posts. If you have any other suggestions or would like to help out, please drop us a note! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion