Journalism and Gender

Here are two articles that touch on freedom of the press and gender in the Islamic world.

A journalist in Afghanistan who had a death sentence for blasphemy commuted to 20 years in prison has now been released, officials say.
Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh has been pardoned by President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan justice ministry confirmed.
Relatives of Mr Kambaksh said he had already left Afghanistan as he had been granted asylum by a European country.
In 2007, he was convicted of distributing material that questioned Islamic attitudes to women.
Media rights groups have welcomed the release of Mr Kambakhsh, which they say is the result of persistent lobbying.
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In this second article, a journalist was arrested, but not for anything she said or did.  Unlike Mr Kambakhsh, she wasn’t charged with blasphemy or with some crime against the state, as dissident journalist so often are.  Her crime was her attire.  She wasn’t dressed properly.

A Sudanese court ruled on Monday that journalist Lubna Ahmad Al-Hussein should be fined two hundred dollars for wearing trousers; considered an indecent outfit in Sudan – applying Islamic Sharia in their law. It’s worth mentioning that Lubna was threatened of a verdict amounting to 40 whip lashes…  More than a thousand persons, including numerous women in trousers, demonstrated in front of the court on Monday in solidarity with the journalist. The police broke up the demonstrators and detained forty eight female activists and journalists on the charge of inciting a riot.
via Trouser-wearing Sudanese journalist escapes flogging, fined $200

It’s worth pointing out that this article is from the site Meedan, a site with the goal of connecting Arabic and English speakers by taking advantage of machine-assisted translation technology.  A useful resource.  More on that later.

Developments in Machine Translation of Arabic

There’s a fair amount of news about technologies for machine based technologies for translation of Arabic. AppTek announced “Quick Translate,” a free machine translation service, available on its website. According to the company’s announcement,

Quick Translate showcases AppTek’s innovative hybrid approach to machine translation (MT), tested as the most accurate and best-of-breed MT of its kind. The service covers English and a variety of other languages (bidirectional): Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, PersianDari, Urdu, Pashto-English, Bahasa Indonesian, Tagalog, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Dutch.

Hybrid MT systems take advantage of the strengths of both rule-based and statistical approaches, while mitigating their weaknesses. AppTek’s HMT solution provides a full integration of both MT methodologies, rather than simply adding rules to the statistical system or a minor statistical module to the rule-based engine. Using the company’s statistical MT platform and augmenting it with its rich rule-based MT engine, AppTek’s HMT solution raises the bar for MT design. The three key translation quality parameters of MT systems – fluency, informativeness, and adequacy – are now supported in one comprehensive system with greater performance, quality and accuracy.

(via PR Press Release)
Research into more robust systems continues, however. Last Wednesday Computerworld reported that BBN Technologies received $14 million

from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week to continue developing its speech and text technology.
BBN has now taken in over $30 million from DARPA over the past few years to fill out the agency’s Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The goal of GALE is to translate and distill foreign language material (television shows and newspapers) in near real-time, highlight salient information, and store the results in a searchable database — all with more than 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Through this process, GALE would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly so they could act on it in a timely fashion.

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via FederalComputerWeek