Crowd-Sourcing Translations of TED’s Lectures | Newsweek Technology

In an effort to go global, conference organizers are crowd-sourcing translations of their renowned 18-minute lectures.

By Nick Summers | Newsweek Web Exclusive

May 15, 2009 | Updated: 7:00 p.m. ET May 15, 2009

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Go to TED.com, the popular home of 18-minute lectures on mind-bending topics, and you'll see this slogan: "Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world." Riveting, sure. Remarkable, definitely. But is that last part really true when the lectures are available only in English, a language not spoken by 75 percent of the globe?

To address the problem and expand its reach, the organization has initiated the TED Open Translation Project, an ambitious and experimental effort to translate as many of its videos into as many languages as possible, using a crowd-sourced army of untrained linguists.

How it works: TED has prepared official English transcripts for each of the 400-plus videos in its library. From there, amateurs around the world are invited to bring the text into their own tongues. Quality controls—two fluent speakers must agree on each new text, and TED has final publishing authority—aim to keep each speaker's ideas intact across language and cultural barriers. Some work has already begun, so the project is launching with 300 translations in 40 languages, from French to Finnish, Korean to Kannada.

The end result is triply cool: viewers at TED.com can hear, say, Hans Rosling present poverty statistics in English, while viewing subtitles in Farsi and scrolling through a clickable transcript in Italian. June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, calls it a "Rosetta Stone effect." She spoke to NEWSWEEK's Nick Summers about the complexities of global collaboration and ensuring elaborate ideas aren't lost in translation. Excerpts:

SUMMERS: When did you first realize a need for translation at TED, and how did you arrive at the crowd-sourcing approach?
COHEN: Ever since we first launched the series, we've been getting requests from people who not just wanted to share the talks, but who wanted to translate for us. "I just translated Ken Robinson's talk into Polish; do you want it? I want to be able to share this." We didn't really know what to do with them. What we needed was an infrastructure for bringing subtitles and translation to the site.

So volunteers were always part of it. But initially, we focused on professionals, because of course we take what we do seriously, and we think it's really important that our speakers' words be faithfully translated. And over the course of the project, we flip-flopped on that, and went from emphasizing professionals … to a project that emphasizes volunteer translation, and is seeded with a few professionally translated talks.

It's true that it is of tremendous importance to share the knowledge with the "rest" 75% percent of the world. Besides TED's, there are technologies that allow this: (1) Machine based - such as Google's translation bot that can be integrated into websites & (2) Human based - such as One Hour Translation, that reduces translation speed and costs. TED's effort, although important by itself, is not enough, and should be on larger scale.