The other week I was reading about FEMEN (Фемен), a feminist movement in Ukraine and their controversial protest tactics which involve going topless whilst wearing traditional flower wreaths. Inspired, I went to their blog to read more. It’s in Russian, so although I could keep visiting and using Google Translate each time, I wanted to subscribe in a more real-time way.
Step one
Take Ukrainian / Russian Twitter account – @Femen_movement
Step two
Get RSS feed of @Femen_movement. This is easier said than done. After Twitter’s redesign you can’t just grab this feed from Twitter directly, and the old RSS feed links won’t work. To get around this I used Netvibes. If you’re not signed in already, create a dashboard on anything, click Add content, then Add a feed, and paste in the URL of the Twitter account (http://twitter.com/femen_movement).
Add the Tweets feed then go to Edit on the newly added widget. Click inside Feed: and copy the URL of the RSS feed of the Twitter account (http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/93478603.rss).
This is longwinded so I’d welcome a faster way to get the URL of a Twitter account RSS feed faster if you know how?
Step 3
Translate the Russian RSS feed into an English RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes. It didn’t offer Ukrainian translation so I’ve used Russian.
Step 4
Create a new Twitter account to ReTweet in English. You’ll need to set up a unique email address to do this.
Step 5
Use Twitterfeed to make your new English Twitter account automatically tweet the translated RSS feed of your foreign language Twitter account. Check your advanced settings are posting the right thing often enough, and you might want to link to something relevant in a suffix.
That’s it! You’re done! You should now have a Twitter account tweeting the English translation of your original Russian Twitter account. You can now subscribe and keep up to date with @femenglish.
One thing I’d like to fix would be to either make it say ‘RT @Femen_movement’ or remove ‘Femen movement:’ from the front of each tweet. I tried this using a prefix of ‘RT @’ on Twitterfeed but a space automatically inserted after the ‘@’ breaks it.
Max has since built upon this project and made some improvements which I’ll let him blog about / comment on.
4 Comments
I thought this was really cool, and I’ve been interested in the same thing, but wondered if we could do it for Chinese/Korean/Arabic language twitter feeds.
I basically leeched your setup and fiddled with @uriminzok – the official twitter profile of North Korea. I found that you can fit a lot more in 140 chars of Korean than you can in English.
So the only change (not an improvement really) I made to your solution was to post the translated feed into Tumblr, to create a place for the longer messages to live, which then feeds into twitterfeed, then to the @uriminzok_eng twitter account.
The biggest problem with this iteration, is that the translation is very wonky, so is more comedic than informative!
I’m interested in whether we could get it functioning a bit better for Mandarin or Arabic, and use it to find out what’s happening on the ground in places where freedom of speech is an issue.
Oh, and I think you can use the regex module in pipes means you can make those tweaks.
Awesome work Megabeth! :)
BTW, you can grab an RSS feed for a Twitter account by substituting
SCREEN_NAMEfor, err, the user’s screen name in the following:http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=SCREEN_NAMEe.g. http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=Femen_movement
Handy walkthrough, thanks. An easy way to get the RSS feed is to use a client like Accessible Twitter – the RSS feed for an individual is displayed as a link on their profile page, see Tim Berners-Lee’s:
http://www.accessibletwitter.com/app/user.php?uid=timberners_lee
Really nice post! Yahoo Pipes is a great tool for working with Twitter. Not only can you translate Tweets to different languages, but you can also filter them based on keywords, resort them chronologically, remove duplicates and a whole lot more. A great tool to learn how to use!
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[...] The other week I was reading about FEMEN (Фемен), a feminist movement in Ukraine and their controversial protest tactics which involve going topless whilst wearing traditional flower wreaths. Inspired, I went to their blog to read more. It’s in Russian, so although I could keep visiting and using Google Translate each time, I wanted to subscribe in a more real-time way. So I created a translated version of their Twitter account using Yahoo Pipes and Twitterfeed to do so. You can read how I did it in step-by-step instructions on my work blog here: Translating Twitter with Yahoo Pipes. [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Beth Granter and NixonMcInnes, Caliber Interactive. Caliber Interactive said: Translating Twitter with Yahoo Pipes http://bit.ly/b506Ww via@bethgranter [...]