The recent explosion of interest in Iran, sparked by the controversy and protests over the recent Iranian elections, highlighted a conspicuous gap: Google and Facebook didn’t speak Persian. At least, they couldn’t help English speakers understand what was being said in Persian.
As Twitter user Cyrus Farivar noted on June 18: “How come Google doesn’t have a Persian language translation yet? There are way more Persian speakers than Estonian.”
The very same day, the Google Translate service added an alpha version of Persian-to-English. Also, Facebook added a test version of Persian translation to the Facebook translation app. There are also ways to read translated Persian tweets.
The Official Google blog explained on Thursday:
“You can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a Web site, a blog, an e-mail, a tweet or a Facebook message.
“… As with all machine translation, it’s not perfect yet. And we’re launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We’ll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we’ll restore service as quickly as we can.”
On the Facebook blog, Eric Kwan credited Facebook users’ volunteer energy for their offering, and solicited continuing help:
“We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. If you speak Persian or any language not yet completely translated, you can help as well by using the Translations application.” (More from Mashable.)
Twitter has been a hub of online action about Iran, but there doesn’t appear to be a direct way to find all current Persian-language tweets. Twitter can display the Arabic script (which, according TechPresident, differs from written Persian only by four letters). However, Persian and Farsi are not yet among the language options for Twitter advanced search.
The third-party application Twitter Local does not offer an option for aggregating all posts originating from within a specific nation. You can use Twitter Local to search for posts originating from, say within 500 miles of Teheran, but I haven’t yet figured out how to make it display anything other than English-language posts.
Similarly, the map-based Twittervision does not appear to make it possible to view new tweets from a given nation; nor does it yet distinguish Persian/Farsi tweets from Arabic.
Still, if you want to see what people are tweeting in Persian, try this: Follow these instructions from Is This Ta’arof? to install a Greasemonkey script that will allow Firefox for Mac to automatically translate Persian Twitter messages into English via Google Translate. Then view in Firefox all tweets in Arabic containing the hashtag #iranelection.
It’s important to note that automated translation — especially via alpha tools — is not reliable. Results can range from useful to confusing to amusing to just plain wrong. Still, it’s better than nothing if you want to understand what’s being said in an unfamiliar language.
(Thanks to the Guardian‘s Jemima Kiss for the tip about Google and Facebook.)
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