TED: Ideas worth spreading is a web site featuring “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. To give you a flavour of the quality of the talks, you can rank them on the home page as: jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny or informative. The “Wow!” factor indeed.
TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) has now introduced an Open Translation Project. The aim is to
bring TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, interactive transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide.
The Open Translation page provides lots of language statistics: this month the language with most translated talks is Spanish, followed by Hebrew; the most active translators (all volunteers) are Shlomo Adam (Hebrew), Michele Gianella (Italian), Diego Leal (Spanish) and Emma Gon (Spanish). Fascinating stuff for language fans.
For more about TED’s language project, see David Pogue’s Great Videos in Any Language from Wednesday’s New York Times. David is a technology columnist for the paper, publishes IT guides and makes entertaining videos on personal technology devices. He’s also an accomplished musician. I’d hate him, but he looks too nice to even mildly dislike.
By Marian Dougan