“Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students.”
- Chris Anderson, TED Curator (source)
The organisers of the TED conference already make great efforts to spread the messages from TED talks – you can watch the talks on the TED website and on YouTube. In an effort to spread the message yet further – to all corners of the earth – the organisers recently announced that a new translation platform will be launched next month! It will be “an open, crowd-sourced solution that puts translation tools in the hands of users.”
This model has worked well for Facebook. Nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking users on Facebook helped translate the site from English to Spanish in less than four weeks (seriously!). Now the 2.8m Facebook users in Latin America and Spain and many more around the world can enjoy the site in Spanish!
If you’re interested in joining the community of TED translators then they’d love to hear from you! Click here to find out more or drop an email to subtitles@ted.com and get involved!