Meedan: New Website Eliminates Language Barrier

After much anticipation, a new website called Meedan has been officially launched granting English and Arabic speakers the opportunity to bypass typical language constraints when reading stories, posting comments and engaging in conversation about issues, events and topics of interest. In short, the site allows English readers to read news articles originally published in Arabic, and vice versa.

Ed Bice, Meedan’s co-founder and chief executive, laments in the Guardian that there is a “tremendous amount of media attention focused on the Middle East, but for the most part we are looking at those stories through the prism of western news agencies.” He continues, “We don’t have a good way of seeing the media that’s being written in Arabic and represents the way the region is understanding these events itself.”

A review of the site by Wired Magazine explains that Meedan – which means “a town square” or “gathering place” in Arabic – was therefore created to “cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West,” or in the words of Bice, “to let someone in Nebraska see an event through the eyes of someone in Nablus.”

The website, which has been in the development phase for the last three years, uses machine translation technology to translate the original text and then allows volunteer translators to refine and correct any mistakes.