Powered by dotSUB's crowd-sourcing plaform, TED’s volunteer translators have generated over 18,500 translations of TED's video Talks in 81 languages during the last two years.
For the first time at TEDGlobal, a small group of TED Translators came together to present ideas and talk about the future of the Open Translation Project. Discussions centered around how to better collaborate, communicate and capture knowledge amongst the TED translator community, as well as playing subtitled TEDTalks in schools and engaging with the TED community at large. Addressing the workshop attendees, TED’s June Cohen said, “Translators are knit into the fabric of what TED is — and what it’s becoming. Not only have you taken the TED mission farther than we imagined, but we’ve learned from you.”
Armenian translator Kristine Sargsyan presented on bringing translated TEDTalks into schools. Spanish translator Lidia Cámara de la Fuente talked about universal Spanish — that is, reconciling the language variations across Spanish-speaking countries. Kaloyana Milinova shared her story of collaboration with the MaYoMo translation team and TEDx in Bulgaria. Katja Tongucer, a German translator, explored how to improve translation quality through knowledge sharing.
Polish translator Krystian Aparta talked about translating terminology, telling the story of how he tracked down the perfect translation for a term in Janna Levin’s talk. Els De Keyser, a Dutch, French and Italian translator, connected online to talk about regionalism — and how translators and reviewers can work together to bridge differences by finding a mutually acceptable word. Serbian translator Ivana Korom talked about community building among the Serbian translators, and proposed the idea of regional translator workshops. And Jenny Yang, a Chinese translator, talked about how she noticed 3 different tribes of translators — and how and why they translate for TED.
The privately funded start-up whose mission is "any video, any language," is targeting entertainment companies and multinational corporations, company founder Michael Smolen told Beet.TV. The translation can be conducted collaboratively, a la Wikipedia-style where anyone can weigh in, or in a closed environment, which works for dotSub media company partners.
Daisy Whitney, Senior Producer
While participating in TED Open Translation Project, you probably use a primitive way of communication (such as email) between translator and reviewer. This service will let you work on Google Docs (spreadsheet), share it with your translation partner, convert the file into srt format so that it can be imported back into the dotSUB service by few mouse clicks. In this video, the guideline of how to import your translation on the Google Docs into dotSUB service is demonstrated with the CSV2srt service : http://kirameister.net/softwares/services/csv2srt.html
It’s been two years since TED Talks enlisted fans around the globe to translate its videos into many languages through its Open Translation Project powered by dotSub, a crowd-sourced translation platform. Today, some 20,000 videos have been translated into 88 languages by over 6,000 volunteers, says Michael Smolens, founder of New York-based dotSub. We spoke with him earlier this week at the Streaming Media East conference in Manhattan. The platform is being used by many organizations from big global companies like Adobe to religious organizations in India, he explains.
Today is the 2-year anniversary of the Open Translation Project! To date, our volunteer translators have created over 18,000 translations of TEDTalks in 81 languages.
There’s a growing movement to make “social translation” – translation of online information by users around the world, motivated more by community recognition and appreciation than by money – a mainstream approach to making the web more accessible to all readers. The movement has been led by the open source software community, and projects like Dwayne Bailey’s pootle toolkit, a set of tools that make it easier to localize open-source software. (Dwayne launched translate.org.za, a project that makes key software available in South Africa’s eleven official languages.) Inspiring projects in the space include WorldWide Lexicon, an open platform to allow cooperative translation of any website; Meedan, an online community that uses social translation as well as machine translation to build dialog between Arabic and English speakers, and dotsub, a powerful video subtitling and translation tool that invites anyone to become a subtitler or translator.
“The volunteers are deeply committed to making the best translation, and they don’t care how long it takes them,” she explains. “There is a passion there that you don’t get from hired guns.” And then there are the cost savings. Ms. Cohen estimates that a professional translation service would charge $500,000 for the translations already completed by volunteers or in process. The most obvious potential liability of crowd-sourced translation is quality control. “Google in Your Language” submissions are “reviewed by the company before they are launched,” said Nate Tyler, a company spokesman. Lingua and TED require a review by a second bilingual translator before publication and have translators sign their work; the signature discourages sloppy or deliberately malicious translations.
The article leads off with a screen shot from TED’s Open Translation project, and quotes June Cohen, who’s championed the use of social translation to make TED’s video content available in dozens, and ultimately hundreds, of languages. June talks about the project in an interview with Newsweek. I wrote about the launch of the Open Translation project a couple of days back, arguing that the model TED is using could be used for any high-quality, compelling internet content. It’s worth mentioning that the TED project is built around dotsub.com, a powerful platform to enable subtitling and translation of web video.
Today, TED’s Open Translation Project marks one full year of making TEDTalks video available to non-English speakers around the world. As of today, more than 4,000 volunteer translators have completed 7,000 translations, with another 2,000 in progress — subtitling TEDTalks in languages as diverse as Arabic, Bulgarian, Mongolian, Tagalog, Uzbek and more than 70 others.
Using an innovative set of web-based translation tools and a crowdsourced workflow, the Open Translation Project has opened TED’s library of almost 700 TEDTalks to the planet’s 4.5 billion non-English speakers.
Are there similar efforts out there that you were able to draw from?
There were only a couple of leading projects from which we could draw best practices. This project is still fairly rare. One is Wikipedia, which deals with text content. Another is Mozilla, which does crowd-sourced translations for the Firefox browser.
We're completely different in terms of the mechanics of translation. We have video subtitles, and they have words in a command box or menu. But they have lots of interesting ideas about how to coordinate among communities, how to motivate, how much control to exert, how much freedom to give.
Late last night, TED volunteer translators Danye West and Tony Yet completed their work on Chris Abani’s 2008 TEDTalk in Simplified Chinese — and in the process, notched the 2,000th translation of a TEDTalk. Since we started TED’s Open Translation Project four months ago, we’ve been thrilled and humbled to see it grow. TEDTalks are now available subtitled in 55 languages, with even more in progress. If you’d like to help translate TEDTalks, learn more here. To watch a TEDTalk that’s been translated, look for the button in the player window that reads “Subtitles” — or, on any Talk page, look for the small red link in the right-hand bar that reads “Open interactive transcript.”
Perhaps what I like most about this project, is that TED is only the beginning – this ‘opening up’ of the world’s knowledge can only gain momentum and spread in other applicable settings. My colleague, Daniela Kortan, recently discussed Academic Earth in the context of a discussion on how the model for learning is changing. Academic Earth and other similar offerings can look to what TED is doing here, and say “that is the way, this is the direction for the future, so that we too can more effectively share our knowledge.” As we in society begin to better equip people with the tools to more effectively learn, more and more people will gain access to the same wealth of knowledge, inspiration, and a world-changing resource – information. Because, as we all know, knowledge is power.
NEW YORK, May 13, 2009 — The acclaimed 18-minute talks available free on the TED website will now be accessible beyond the English-speaking world, through the TED Open Translation Project (www.ted.com/translation), which launches today, generously sponsored by Nokia.
A year in the making, the project offers video subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for volunteers worldwide to translate any talk into any language. The project launches with 300 translations in 40 languages; more than 200 volunteer translators have already contributed.
TED's June Cohen led a panel on social translation at South by Southwest this weekend. The panel -- run as a tight, advice-dense conversation -- brought together leaders from three of the web's most prominent social (i.e. volunteer) translation projects, including Seth Bindernagel, Director of Localization for Mozilla's Firefox browser, and...
A new decade. An ongoing global financial crisis. It's a time to regroup, re-evaluate -- and then to dream. Dream big. Because the world of ideas has never mattered more. For TED2010 we've assembled a lineup of speakers whose ideas and ingenuity will thrill, enlighten and inspire. It's What the World Needs Now ...
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