Found in Translation

Ideas Worth Spreading Beyond English
Eighteen minutes. That’s the maximum time available to deliver a TED talk.
But it’s a talk that will likely be watched by hundreds of millions of people
around the world. If you’ve never seen a TED talk before, be prepared to get
addicted. Imagine a collection of some of the world’s most dynamic speakers,
sharing their thoughts on their life’s work in less than twenty minutes. Steve
Jobs was among them, and it’s exactly that sort of “brainiac charisma” that
characterizes most of TED’s speakers. The organization’s mission is to share
ideas that can change the world.
In the not-too-distant past, you’d have had to pay hundreds (if not thousands)
of dollars to travel to a conference and bear witness to ideas like these,
communicated by experts in every conceivable field of human knowledge.
After taking time away from work and checking your bank balance, how many
events could you realistically afford to travel to each year? One, maybe two?
Now, picture yourself living in Swaziland. Or Laos. Or Nicaragua. And
imagine that you don’t speak English. What would your hopes be of ever
attending such talks, let alone understanding them?
TED has solved both of those problems. Its thought-provoking talks are
available to anyone with access to the Internet. Perhaps even more important,
they are on offer in a whopping ninety-one languages, and rising fast.
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And
that’s where translation comes in. Go to the TED website, and you can find
talks that have been subtitled by an impressive seventy-five hundred registered
volunteer translators.
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How did the project start? “Soon after we made TED talks available for the
first time, people around the world began approaching us to see if they could
subtitle the talks into other languages so they could be shared,” explains Kristin

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Windbigler, Open Translation Project manager at TED.
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She points out that
these enthusiastic individuals were not requesting TED to provide the subtitles;
instead, they were volunteering to do it. “We heard this request over and over
again, from dozens of people around the world, many of whom began
subtitling talks on their own, just to share them with friends,” Windbigler
points out. The requests were so persistent that TED knew it had to take them
seriously. So the organization set about building a system that would allow
volunteers to subtitle the talks in other languages.
And the system works. More than a thousand talks have been translated, and
20 percent of all TED talk video views come from people watching with
subtitles enabled. Volunteers translate TED talks into languages as diverse as
Bislama, spoken natively by six thousand people in Vanuatu, and Hupa, a
Native American language with less than two thousand speakers. On the other
hand, you’ll also find plenty of translated talks that are available in languages
with enormous populations, such as Malayalam, the mother tongue of thirty-
six million people in India, and Khmer, with fifteen million speakers in
Cambodia.
But just because a language is widely spoken does not mean that it’s always
easy to obtain information in it. Let’s consider Arabic, which has more than
three hundred million native speakers. Arabic is a language that is growing in
importance in the world. With more and more people obtaining access to the
Internet each day, its growth rate is outpacing many other languages.
In fact, one of the most prolific translators in the TED community speaks
Arabic as his mother tongue. His name is Anwar Dafa-Alla, and he lives in
Sudan. The talk that first inspired Dafa-Alla to translate with the goal of
sharing it with others in his country and continent was called “African
Einstein” by Neil Turok. It was the first of many talks that he would watch. As
of December 2011, he had worked on more than 685 TED talks into Arabic.
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The process TED uses requires one person to translate the talks and a second
person to review the translations to make sure they are accurate. Dafa-Alla
used to translate the majority of the talks into Arabic himself, but now he
mostly reviews the translations of others. He speaks not only Arabic and
English, but Korean—he’s obtaining his PhD in South Korea—and he works as
a university professor in Sudan.
Why does someone like Dafa-Alla donate his time and translation skills to
TED? Like many of the volunteers, he is hungry for knowledge. “TED
speakers are usually at the cutting edge of their fields and their technologies,”
he explains. This can make the translation especially challenging. “You often
end up coining new terms in Arabic, or coming up with a creative approach to

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the terminology. At the same time, you need to make sure that it can be
understood by the average, everyday speaker.”
But his own thirst for information is not the only motivator. Dafa-Alla wants
to make sure others can also benefit from new ideas. At the same time, he also
wants to make sure that the voices of Arabic speakers are heard. “We need to
tell our own stories of our own lives, so that other people can learn from those
stories too.”
Apparently, Dafa-Alla’s underlying reasons for volunteering are similar to
those of other translators who volunteer for TED. “They care deeply about
making the world a better place. The democratization of ideas is very
important to them,” Windbigler points out. After all, if the mission of TED is
to share ideas that can change the world, translation spreads those ideas even
further. One can only hope that, as time goes on, more and more TED talks
will be available in languages that are subtitled into English instead. After all,
great ideas can come from anywhere.