Over the past five months (corresponding with five Out of Eden Milestones), we at Meedan have joined Paul on his journey northward from the harsh desert near Maqna, Saudi Arabia, through a Syrian refugee camp near Ghor al Safi, Jordan, and into a busy urban gas station in Jenin in the West Bank.
But rather than taking pictures, we “take” Tweets — nearly 10,000 geotagged Tweets within some 500 miles of each of Paul’s Milestones — and select a small number of them for analysis (for more on how we do this, see Our Process, below). And then, just as Paul tells the story of the world he sees, we translate the world we encounter online.
These Tweets range from poignant reflections on life to prosaic observations about kid brothers, from deeply personal matters to regional and global events. Captured just a few days before and after each of Paul’s stops, they are simply fragments of the many musings, thoughts, conversations, and commentaries posted online. Yet each brief, shared journey brings its own range of surprises and insights — a stunning cross-section of life, like overheard conversations on a crowded subway car.
For example, Tweets about the singer Justin Bieber are a fact of life on the internet.
After “the Biebs” was arrested for driving under the influence in Miami, Florida on January 23, 2014, Tweets about him numbered over 4 million within 24 hours, maxing out at a stunning 6,100 Tweets per minute. His arrest caused ripples across the English-speaking world and perhaps beyond, as fans expressed concern for his health and safety.
Take a random sampling of Tweets from English-speaking users in Jordan and Israel last January and February as Paul traversed the region, and you’re likely to find many about Justin Bieber.
A Tweet from Milestone 18 is a good example. “1 universe, 8 planets, 204 countries, 809 Islands, 7 days, 7 billion people… and I still love only one Canadian,” wrote a fan on Twitter. That Tweet needed no translation, except for a brief explanation that the “Canadian” in question was Justin Bieber.
That Tweet appeared the same week that Paul interviewed Houssein Ali al Hajji, a 27-year-old Syrian farmer living at the Milestone, near Ghor al Safi, Jordan. Al Hajji said, “We want to go back to Hamā. It is on our minds all the time. We dream this. We don’t know when we can. It is the war.”
It was a week when we also included Tweets about the passing of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, popular tourist sites, and the latest football (soccer) match between Qatar and Jordan. A casual glance at Tweets in the region revealed English, Hebrew, French, Spanish and Korean, but the vast majority was in Arabic.
Between 2010 and 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring and as part of a larger trend of Arabic content on the web, Twitter saw over 2000 percent growth in Arabic Tweets. Those numbers are staggering, but what are Arabic speakers tweeting about?
In the November and December of 2013, a sampling of Arabic language Tweets from Paul’s walk through Saudi Arabia yielded everything from commentary about the war in Syria and women drivers to prayers — lots and lots of prayers.
“I don’t understand why some tweeps unfollow me because I use a service that tweets hadiths and Koranic verses,” sighed one user who’d recently been tweeting a large number of prayers. Those devotional, automated Tweets came courtesy of a service called Gharedly (Arabic for “Tweet for me”) which sends out prayers and Koranic verses on behalf of anyone who adds their Twitter account. Gharedly is essentially a massive Twitter bot, a program that engages with Twitter in a fairly automatic way. In the English-speaking world, such programs are often used for humorous interactions, correcting grammar, sending spam, or posting automated data reports about the weather, earthquakes or time.)
Like the regularity of prayer with rosary beads or mandala wheels, Gharedly Tweets are seen as deeds of faith. The service can be set up for any range of subjects, and they can take the form of Koranic verses, hadith, pictures, proverbs, and other types of messages to share. Users can also add their own words of devotion.
In Saudi Arabia, Gharedly takes up a major portion of the Twittersphere—at one point the service had over 150,000 followers on Twitter, and they accounted for a substantial percentage of Tweets geotagged in Saudi Arabia. Cross the border into Jordan, though, and you quickly begin to see more Foursquare check-ins and Instagram snapshots.
Despite their large numbers, posts from “Beliebers” and believers alike are just a fragment of the myriad Tweets posted daily in the Middle East. And while Arabic, Hebrew, and English are the most common languages seen so far, we’ve also encountered Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai, Spanish, French, and others.
A few highlights, selected from Tweets we have collected and translated to date.
The Value of Translating Social Media Ephemera
More than 2,000 years ago, scraps of letters were buried in a dump outside Oxyrhyncus, a city a few hundred miles south of Cairo, and preserved almost perfectly in the dry climate. Discovered in the late 19th century, the letters reflected the town’s diversity — Greeks, Egyptians and Romans — and shed light into the daily lives of common people in the Roman Empire. For that reason they are immensely valuable as a cultural and ethnographic record.
“Send Soteris the puppy,” wrote someone named Akulas to a friend, “since she now spends her time by herself in the country.”
“If you [write to me],” another implored his brother, “you will have done me a favour: for we shall have the impression, through our letters, of seeing one another face to face.”
These snippets, translated and richly interpreted in Peter Parsons’s City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, transport us to another place and time, as we see both our common humanity and the vast differences in the way people have lived. As students of culture, journalists and researchers can help bridge linguistic and cultural divides by preserving, cataloging and translating ephemera.
Two thousand years later, prosaic messages from the region are just as engaging when translated and reinterpreted for contemporary readers.
“With all the pain and torments of the field … there are so many experiences,” wrote one Israeli soldier, reflecting on training in a country where military service is mandatory.
“All that connects me to you is a bunch of electronic devices,” reflected someone in Saudi Arabia, where wide access to the internet is a relatively recent phenomenon. “If humanity goes back to its primitive state, I would lose you forever.”
Translating social media opens windows into the stories behind the stunning internet growth in the region. Because their Tweets are geotagged, most of these Twitter users occupy a relatively privileged position in society (geotagging Tweets is generally only possible for those who use a phone equipped with GPS). But these are ordinary people, not journalists or celebrities. Before the internet, their voices and perspectives were less likely to be represented in international media. Over time, more and more will be joining the sphere of global online conversations.
At Meedan, we started Translatedesk because we believe in a global, cross-lingual web. We take inspiration from the words of Ethan Zuckerman, who noted in a TED talk that despite the internet’s ability to connect us on a global scale, most of us focus on our local, familiar spheres of life — a phenomenon that Zuckerman calls “imaginary cosmopolitanism.”
“The real problems in the world, the interesting problems to solve, are global in scale and scope,” he argued. “They require global conversations to get to global solutions.”
Zuckerman, Director at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of of Connection, has advised both Meedan and the Out of Eden Walk on this project, and he introduced our two organizations as collaborators. Our collective projects — Meedan’s traversing of the globe by digital means and Paul’s traversing of the globe by foot, hoof and boat — made a natural fit. With the rapid growth of internet usage around the world, we believe strongly that social media translation will be critical to telling stories across countries and cultures.
Our Process: How We Translate the World
To render the cultural context of social media, simple linguistic translation is rarely enough — proper translation requires multiple steps and passes through many hands. First there is the enormous challenge of collecting the data. We collaborate with Map-D’s Tweetmap, a powerful data analysis tool for geolocated social media data, to pull Tweets in the region.
We then sift through the posts — a rich variety of inside jokes, @replies and any variety of messages — for the gems that speak to us and tell a story. We begin first with a thorough curation session, sifting carefully for messages that might offer an additional cultural insight or perspective. Then, not only do we translate the content of the message, we also provide annotations that help tell the background story and assumptions that might be present. A Tweet about Hadag Nahash music in Israel, for instance, merits a brief description of the genre, which might be unfamiliar to English-speaking readers.
In the future, we hope to take the platform further. In the spirit of Paul’s global storytelling journey, we aim to grow our base of volunteer global contributors who can curate, translate, and tell the stories of the communities we find online in the areas that Paul passes through. We want to support these volunteer translators’ efforts — which could be as simple as a single translation — with a robust platform that encourages participation and facilitates curation to enable rich, collaborative storytelling of the digital space.
This platform will be part of a larger community and translator management strategy for the site, and we hope to democratize translation (both linguistic and cultural) for a broader community of participants. We will also create a working archive of social media ephemera (some translated, most not) as a historical record of the Out of Eden Walk journey.
With greater diversity of participants, we hope to share more perspectives from the region.
Just as Paul’s vignettes of his physical journey combine to create a powerful narrative, we hope that the aggregate of these Tweets and their translations will form a small but meaningful snapshot of how we live today, both in physical space and digital space.
Behind each of these tiny Tweets is a story.
Written with support and research contributions from Anas Qtiesh and Ed Bice.