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Celebrating 1 year of the Open Translation Project

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Today, TED’s Open Translation Project marks one full year of making TEDTalks video available to non-English speakers around the world. As of today, more than 4,000 volunteer translators have completed 7,000 translations, with another 2,000 in progress — subtitling TEDTalks in languages as diverse as Arabic, Bulgarian, Mongolian, Tagalog, Uzbek and more than 70 others.

Using an innovative set of web-based translation tools and a crowdsourced workflow, the Open Translation Project has opened TED’s library of almost 700 TEDTalks to the planet’s 4.5 billion non-English speakers.

“TED’s mission is to spread ideas, and it’s hard to imagine a more effective way of doing that than translating the talks into all the world’s languages,” said June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media. “With the help of our extraordinary volunteer translators, this project has allowed us to create a truly global dialogue.”

“I translate for the hundreds of millions of Arabic language speakers,” said Anwar Dafa-Alla, a volunteer translator from Sudan who just this week completed his 300th translation of TEDTalks. “I translate because it’s a way to promote mutual respect between different cultures, people and religions. Participating in TED’s translation project is a good way to show how compassionate we are toward each other.”

Read in-depth Q&As from some of TED’s volunteer translators on the TED Blog >>

Read the press release >>

Learn more about TED’s Open Translation Project >>