ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program
ICANN says it will use a combination of AI and crowdsourcing to translate new gTLD program materials on the cheap.
Org said in a blog post that when a community member trying to drum up interest in new gTLDs in their local community needs some official ICANN documents in an unsupported language, ICANN will prepare a translation on demand.
The first run will be done with AI machine translation, and the draft will be posted on a community wiki for review by volunteers who can read the relevant language before ICANN finalizes and publishes a final PDF.
ICANN seems ready to post drafts of documents such as FAQs and info sheets in languages such as Hindi, Italian and Portuguese after next week’s ICANN 82 public meeting.
Program documents are usually only available in the six official UN languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian — so this project should bring the new gTLD program to a much wider audience.
Using AI and volunteers should mean it costs almost nothing beyond the work hours ICANN staff put in to administer it.
ChatGPT tells me that there are 195 to 200 official national languages in the world and 3,500 to 4,000 written languages altogether, but I didn’t check whether those numbers are correct.
If the AI is wrong, let me know in the comments.
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Icann was criticized for “not doing anything” about the russian invasion of Ukraine but I recently heard that some had considered translating the next Applicant Guidebook into Ukrainian instead of russian. Is that true or is it just an insider’s joke?
Sounds like bullshit to me.
Russian language is not under sanctions, Russian Federation is. Russian is still one of UN languages.