With protests over disputed elections in Iran continuing to attract international attention, two major Web sites are aiming to help the information flow. Both Google and Facebook are making efforts to overcome the language barrier affecting some communications.

While some of those sharing their take on events from inside the country are able to write in English (and other international languages), many of the accounts are written in the national language Farsi, also known as Persian.

Google has responded by adding Farsi to its Google Translate service, meaning both Web pages and individual pieces of text can be translated from English to Farsi and vice versa. The company warns that with the feature only just added (and a likely high demand), there may be some technical issues at first.

It also acknowledges that some translations may not be as good as possible at this stage, but encourages users to click on the “contribute a better translation” link besides results if they want to correct a mistake. It will be interesting to see if that develops into a battle between supporters of the two main presidential candidates as there’s clearly room for dispute over phrases which could have pejorative political meanings

Meanwhile Facebook has added a Persian edition of the site. While this doesn’t affect user-generated content such as posts, it does mean that navigation and help pages will be easier for Farsi speakers. The company says more than 400 users have already helped by offering translations of some of the phrases uses by Facebook throughout the site.

There have been several other effects of the Iran dispute online. Some Twitter users have tweaked their avatars (the picture which appears besides their posts) to appear in shades of green as a sign of support for those protesting the official results. New “real-time” search engine Collecta uses Iran as its default example of a topic to search for. And controversial torrent site The Pirate Bay has temporarily rebranded itself as The Persian Bay.

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Entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 1:00 pm under Google, Politics.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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