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RE: Resources
Once again, much like the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, there will be an opportunity to skip the hype-injecting media and get closer to the source.
Yeah, and that's precisely why I personally think some of the sources I linked went out of their way to discredit this program. I mean, come on. 48k boxes of documents in Arabic and the Bush administration is going to cherry-pick documents to justify their reasons for going to war!? There was also a lot of repeating the slogan "If they knew where the WMD were or that al Qaeda was involved, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops".
I also like the "open source" aspect of this. Many people think translation is a straight forward process, that A=>B. There are a lot of subtleties and nuances to translating some languages, and some things do not translate well and are open to interpretation. Things like body language, tone, etc. play a factor in the spoken word. Translators can also screw you over if you trust them without verification. The US (and other countries) have had problems, notably in Bosnia, Somalia, and in Iraq, with heavily biased translators lying to us or to the locals because they were from a group the translator opposed. This will be more like scientific method at work here. So if person A makes some fantastic claim as to what document #41446BAQ says, then all the other readers can shift to that document and verify what it says to confirm or deny. It's not at all like Rush Limbaugh's or Al Franken's personal Arabic translator is going to be doing the translating without someone checking behind them, as one of the articles implied.
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I think the motivation behind this move is obvious:
Personally, I think it's a great idea. Assuming the logistics are reasonably well organized, they stand to speed up the translation process and inform the public simultaneously. I wouldn't be surprised of some of those helping with the translations even opened up blogs to report their activities. Once again, much like the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, there will be an opportunity to skip the hype-injecting media and get closer to the source.
If this is met with even moderate success, I can see it being done increasingly when the government (or even a high-profile business or organization) wants to improve public relations and weed through large amounts of information at the same time.
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