VOTE

Name: TED Open-Translation Project

Nominated Category: Collaboration

URL: http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/287

Area: Non-profit, Service, Volunteerism, Language

About Open Translation:

TED — the non-profit first dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” in Technology, Entertainment and Design when established in 1984, and has since expanded to cover many more topics — is perhaps most famous for its TED conferences, and thanks to the Internet, its TED Talks.

Description:

For the past few years, selected talks, which feature everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton, have been posted on TED.com for free–and captioned in English. Now the TED Open-Translation Project aims to translate and subtitle TED Talks for the people of the world who don’t speak English.

Released in May 2009, version 1.0 of the Open-Translation Project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators. To start, a handful of talks were translated professionally into 20 languages, but going on the project will be completely reliant on volunteers from Beijing to Beirut, who use a platform created by TED and technology partner dotSUB.

On its web site, TED calls the project, “one of the most comprehensive attempts by a major media platform to subtitle and index online video content. It’s also a groundbreaking effort in the public, professional use of volunteer translation.” While the folks at TED are the ones who push the final “publish” button, it’s the volunteer participants translating and subtitling in Greek, Hausa, Persian and Basque around the world that make this project actually work.

Currently, what’s available with the 1.0 version are subtitles on every talk (available in English and any translated language); interactive transcript (in English and any translated language); personalized pages within each translator’s member profiles that shows the translations to which a translator has contributed; and more.

Anyone can become a translator for TED – though your translation will ultimately be vetted and reviewed by TED before it’s accepted and published. You’re required to translate an entire talk, and within a month of assignment. And even if you’re not a translator, if you see a mistake in a translation or want to make a suggestion or comment, information on how to contact the translator and reviewer of a TEDTalk is listed in the “About this talk” section of each video. In version 1.1., TED.com will also allow members to post open comments that everyone can see.

Volunteerism isn’t always glamorous. You certainly don’t get paid – though translators are credited, recognized on the TED Translators page, and have special pages on their TED member profiles, listing translations to which they contributed. But, as TED puts it, “every translator will be taking part in our global effort to spread ideas and engage in global dialogue. We know from our current translators that there’s a huge satisfaction in bringing inspired talks to speakers of their own language worldwide.”

The Basics:

WHO: TED.com and volunteer translators

WHAT: Translating TEDTalks into the world’s languages

WHERE: All over the world, currently in 40+ languages

HOW to get involved: If you’re bilingually fluent, you may qualify to translate. All members can comment and make suggestions on translations, by directly contacting the translator. Having the TED Open-Translation Project means you can watch “an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript.” Just think about what that would look like.

WHAT other people are saying:

Worldchanging magazine

Newsweek magazine

Sobel Media Post

Africa Unchained blog

VOTE

Name: TED Open-Translation Project

Nominated Category: Collaboration

URL: http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/287

Area: Non-profit, Service, Volunteerism, Language

About Open Translation:

TED — the non-profit first dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” in Technology, Entertainment and Design when established in 1984, and has since expanded to cover many more topics — is perhaps most famous for its TED conferences, and thanks to the Internet, its TED Talks.

Description:

For the past few years, selected talks, which feature everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton, have been posted on TED.com for free–and captioned in English. Now the TED Open-Translation Project aims to translate and subtitle TED Talks for the people of the world who don’t speak English.

Released in May 2009, version 1.0 of the Open-Translation Project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators. To start, a handful of talks were translated professionally into 20 languages, but going on the project will be completely reliant on volunteers from Beijing to Beirut, who use a platform created by TED and technology partner dotSUB.

On its web site, TED calls the project, “one of the most comprehensive attempts by a major media platform to subtitle and index online video content. It’s also a groundbreaking effort in the public, professional use of volunteer translation.” While the folks at TED are the ones who push the final “publish” button, it’s the volunteer participants translating and subtitling in Greek, Hausa, Persian and Basque around the world that make this project actually work.

Currently, what’s available with the 1.0 version are subtitles on every talk (available in English and any translated language); interactive transcript (in English and any translated language); personalized pages within each translator’s member profiles that shows the translations to which a translator has contributed; and more.

Anyone can become a translator for TED – though your translation will ultimately be vetted and reviewed by TED before it’s accepted and published. You’re required to translate an entire talk, and within a month of assignment. And even if you’re not a translator, if you see a mistake in a translation or want to make a suggestion or comment, information on how to contact the translator and reviewer of a TEDTalk is listed in the “About this talk” section of each video. In version 1.1., TED.com will also allow members to post open comments that everyone can see.

Volunteerism isn’t always glamorous. You certainly don’t get paid – though translators are credited, recognized on the TED Translators page, and have special pages on their TED member profiles, listing translations to which they contributed. But, as TED puts it, “every translator will be taking part in our global effort to spread ideas and engage in global dialogue. We know from our current translators that there’s a huge satisfaction in bringing inspired talks to speakers of their own language worldwide.”

The Basics:

WHO: TED.com and volunteer translators

WHAT: Translating TEDTalks into the world’s languages

WHERE: All over the world, currently in 40+ languages

HOW to get involved: If you’re bilingually fluent, you may qualify to translate. All members can comment and make suggestions on translations, by directly contacting the translator. Having the TED Open-Translation Project means you can watch “an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript.” Just think about what that would look like.

WHAT other people are saying:

Worldchanging magazine

Newsweek magazine

Sobel Media Post

Africa Unchained blog

Rob Kramer

ROB KRAMER
Founder, CEO of PopRule

Rob has spent the past 20 years as an entrepreneur and executive in the media, technology, environmental, and non-profit sectors. Rob is the co-founder of PopRule, a distributed democracy platform and application for taking and distributing rapid political action.

TS: Tell me about PopRule why did you start it?

Rob Kramer: I started it to get the tools back into people’s hands so they could take political action and actually effect change in their own lives. We live in a country of so-called representative government, but in a sense we’ve been duped. We create this incredible relationship with our elected officials during their campaigns – we all get very excited about certain candidates, whether they’re local school board officials or the president. But the moment they take office the relationship basically ends. Or it only continues to the extent that the politician needs to reach out to his or her constituents.

TS: So do you think that social media is the tool we need to make politicians more accountable?

RK: I really believe it can change the world on so many levels, whether it’s politics and government, or humanitarian issues, or green issues.

TS: Is there anything you’re seeing apart from, obviously, PopRule, that you’re really excited about? Any ways people are using the technology or any new technology that’s coming about that you think might have some impact?

RK: Technology doesn’t solve problems, people do. Is crowdsourcing a technology? Not really. Does the underlying technology enable the crowdsourcing – the social networks that crowdsorucing can happen around? Yes. Social media is a reflection, an exteriorization of basic human behavior from the beginning of time. We’ve been in this very one-way world recently, and that’s changing through social media. There was a point at which it was all about corporations running the government and the economy – which they still do, in many respects and the traffic was all one way.

TS: And what do you think the threats are to people using social media in the public interest?

RK: I think one of the threats is this issue of net neutrality and whether or not these tools are going to be in the hands of a select few or have the ability to benefit everyone. There is the threat of further segmenting certain parts of society and leaving them behind. I do believe though that social media is truly democratizing.

Television is a one-way medium. It’s a passive medium. Whereas if I participate in social media or social networks or distributed democracy, I am participating in the process, I have the ability to create, I have the ability to activate, and I have the ability to distribute that action. It requires me to participate. That’s a good thing, and it is the way human beings have always lived. We entered a period for maybe a couple hundred years where it everything was very top-down. And some people were marginalized. Social media is a much more inclusive, participatory model in which people can self-organize.

TS: Where do you see the public interest of social media in a couple of years?

RK: In politics, from a PopRule perspective, we really believe that by the presidential election 2012 every candidate will have an open channel of communication with various issue-based sectors of society through these tools. People will actually contribute to policy, contribute to the shaping of a particular platform that the candidate of that party stands on. They will actually be participating in government like we did when we had tribal councils By 2012 social media will have changed and transformed the entire political process all the way through legislation it’ll be crowdsourced. There will always be representative, I imagine but the people will start to inform the representative on how they want to be represented, as opposed to the other way around.

TS: So essentially we will have come full circle from tribal villages through technology to a position where every elected official is as accountable as a shaman in a tribe.

RK: Yes, I think so. We’re not re-inventing behavior here, we’re re-discovering behavior. In the green sector, for example, there’s a great desire to find solutions – whether it’s climate change, or transportation, or alternatives to fossil fuels, the collective society has the opportunity with social media and its infrastructure to crowdsource solutions and ideas that collectively benefit us. Social media is going to enable us to do it more rapidly than we could possibly do it for some top-down corporate, entrepreneurial or governmental approach.

We need all of the spare brain cycles that everyone has, the wisdom of crowds, collectively, as the human race work through this challenge. There’s no way a corporation or government is going to be able to do this alone. Social media is going to be the tool, the environment, and the guide through which we can achieve things that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. I ve actually been involved with the international water sector for about five, six years and done clean, safe water projects in three developing world countries. Every time I go to those countries it’s a big challenge; it takes 6 weeks and it’s a lot of planning, and you’re going into a place that you don’t know about. Well, because of social media we’re able to find problems and solutions much quicker, we’re able to plan ahead in terms of what’s required, at what point and where around the world, and we can collectively deal with those issues. So when we do show up on the ground we’re actually much more effective. The perfect example of this is that you could go online right now and donate 25 dollars to a social entrepreneur in Bangladesh who needs to buy a couple of sewing machines to start his textile business.