By Kim Zetter May 13, 2009 TED is turning to the crowd for help in opening its popular talks to a broader audience. The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, which turned a Swedish academic into a rock starand introduced the world to Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight, has launched a new project to translate its celebrated video talks. And it wants your help. The $6,000 invitation-only conference for the elite digerati set began posting free videos of its talks online a few years ago. Since then the videos have been viewed more than 100 million times. But until now they’ve only been available in English. After receiving repeated pleas to translate the talks, the organization is doing just that. The Open Translation Project, launched Wednesday, combines crowd sourcing with smart language markup to provide translated and transcribed videos in multiple languages that can be indexed and searched by key words. The cool part is that users can click on any phrase in the transcript of a talk, and jump to that point in the video. Some 300 translations have already been completed in 40 languages — from Arabic to Urdu. A handful of talks were translated into 20 languages by professional translators. But most were done by more than 200 volunteers around the world. Another 450 translations are in the works. A drop-down menu on the main TED Talks page allows you to sort videos by available languages. “The entire goal and inspiration of the project is to be truly global and spread talks beyond the English world,” said June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media. The videos are all in English with subtitles. A drop-down menu lists subtitle languages from which to choose. Next to the video a window displays a full transcript of the video to allow viewers to follow along with the talk or find the most salient points and skip ahead. Click a phrase in the transcript — such as the point where director JJ Abrams discusses his grandfather’s mystery box — and the video immediately jumps to that spot. Users can search for key words in a specific video or among all of the translated videos. The transcripts also mean that key words in each video can now be indexed by outside search engines. Type the term “green rooftops” into Google, and among the links in your results page will probably be one that takes you directly to the point in Majora Carter’s talk where she discusses a green roof project in the Anyone can sign up to translate a video. But at least two fluent translators are required to work on each video for quality control and to discourage mischief-makers who might want to introduce inappropriate material into the translation. “The second translator’s role is the editor’s role,” Cohen says. “Proofreading, checking for typos and questions of style to prevent the use of regional terms that won’t be widely understood.” TED matches translators to work with one another, or groups can volunteer to work together. All translators are credited on the site. TED provides guidelines and a professionally generated English transcript of the talk to each translator to ensure that translators don’t misinterpret a speaker’s words and that every translation starts from the same master transcript. Nokia has sponsored the subtitle project, and dotSUB provided the platform that translators use to create the marked up transcripts. Cohen says they’ve had interest from other groups and web sites that are interested in launching similar translation projects. “Our hope is to pave the way and to provide an example a proof of concept for where we think the web is heading – in terms of the accessibility of video content through subtitling and through interactive transcripts to make online video documents radically more accessible,” says Cohen. “There’s a lot of ways it can go wrong. So we’re hoping to provide the proof that this can actually work and it can work beautifully and on a really large scale.”
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