Watch volunteers translate Egyptian phone messages in real-time

Don’t believe in the power of crowdsourcing yet? Well, if initiatives such as Wikipedia and Ushahidi haven’t convinced you, the video below should pretty much negate anyone’s doubts about just how monumental a force crowdsourcing has become.

Earlier today, in response to the continued blackout of the Internet in Egypt, Google announced that it had set up phone numbers in Egypt for protesters to call into, that would then automatically be turned into voicemail messages, that would then be tweeted out on the account @Speak2Tweet.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, a number of volunteers outside of Egypt (you know, where the Internet still works) decided to collaborate online to get those voicemails – which are mainly in Arabic – translated into English and then we’re guessing that these will then tweeted out yet again (or perhaps they plan to put them all up on some kind of website?).

We captured a Google Docs spreadsheet just now of volunteers translating the phone messages left by Egyptian protesters at lightning speed. The video below is in real-time – we did nothing to speed it up. Either watch it and be in awe, or go right to the spreadsheet and watch it continue to update (or better yet, if you can translate Arabic to English, lend a hand!):

Update: We originally assumed that these translations would be retweeted out somehow, but we have yet to see evidence / the tweets yet. We’ve contacted Google (which most likely do not actually have any official connection to these volunteers) to see if it is aware of any efforts to get these translations tweeted out again, but regardless, the effort and the spirit of these volunteers speaks for itself. We’ll update as soon as we find out more information.

[via: thenextweb]