Project 10 to the 100 was originally supposed to be open for voting last January, but they say they got more response than they ever anticipated and it's taking way longer than expected to sort through the responses.
I wonder to what extent this is a translation problem?
They accepted submission in, and I quote, "English, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Danish, or Thai". If I'm counting right, that's 25 languages. So they all need to be translated into the preferred language of each of the people helping select the top 100, and then the top 100 all need to be translated into each of those 25 languages. Skimping on the translation will prevent ideas from being assessed fairly.
If I recall correctly, the submissions had to be very short. On one hand, this reduces the translation workload because there are fewer words. On the other hand, fewer words means less context or background, so it may well happen that there are cases where the translator honestly does not understand the problem they're attempting to solve, especially since Google seems smart enough to use target-language-mother-tongue translators, which means the person translating Thai into English may well be living in the states and not grok the, say, technical problem with rice paddies that the proposal is attempting to solve.
Also, I wonder if the word count requirements were the same for all languages? How would this affect the quality of the ideas? How would this affect the quality of the translations? (Imagine translating English to French without exceeding the English word count!)
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