Nativetext: Delivering RSS feeds to the rest of the world
Yesterday I had the strange experience of finding a link to one of my posts on a blog that was part Dutch and part English. My quote was in the original English, but the commentary by the blog's author, Fred Zelders, was in Dutch. What's could this mean? If a reader of this blog could understand my quote, why not write the whole blog in English? Today I had lunch with James Cann, founder of Nativetext, who explained that this phenomenon is exactly what he wants to harness as the engine to translate the blogosphere from English into many other languages. James told me that there are bloggers like Zelders all over the world who see it as their mission to bring English blogs across the language barrier to their native country. Zelders probably speaks fluent English, but prefers to use his native language. His readers are the same. Beyond this boundary of multi-lingual bloggers, however, are many more readers whose English isn't good enough to read my blog without having it translated.
What James hopes to do with Nativetext is provide a set of web based tools that will make it easy for a blogger like Zelders to grab an RSS feed for a blog he is interested in and produce a translated version. In effect, Nativetext would be a multi-lingual Feedburner which takes English RSS feeds and serves copies of these feeds in many other languages. The interesting part of James' idea is that he doesn't plan on paying either the author of the original English feed or the translator who produces the new version. He'll also allow owners of the original feed to take the translated versions and serve them on their own sites free of charge. In fact, James is honest enough to admit that he doesn't even know how he will get paid.
I can hear the snarks warming up now. Yet another kumbaya singing, don't worry about money, Web 2.0 flight of fancy. Personally, I think James is right in not worrying about a business model. He is trying to solve a big problem, and if he suceeds, people will be throwing money at him. He can come up with a business model then, whether it is charging corporations, magazines, or newspapers to translate their content and passing a percentage on to the translators, or selling the whole thing to Rupert Murdoch. The important thing is creating an infrastructure that will attract a community of users to do the translation and provide quality control. Why should they do this work for free? Because they want to bring the blogosphere to citizens of their country, and maybe gain some recognition for doing so. Why should bloggers allow their blogs to be translated for free? Because they are already giving away their content in an RSS feed, so this just means more subscribers.
Now an interesting question emerges. At what point in reading this did you think about using Nativetext to go the other way and translate Arabic, Hebrew, or Japanese blogs into English? Did you even consider it? I actually didn't until I was halfway through writing this. I guess I'm just an ugly American, but now that I have thought about it, it is pretty exciting. Do Chinese tech bloggers think Google is out of control? What are French political bloggers saying about George Bush? I can't wait to find out.
