19 February 2009

UNESCO's endangered language report: We've lost Manx

The newest edition of UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger totes up 6,000 world languages -- and counts 2,500 as endangered and 200 as completely lost. The interactive atlas, released today, ranks the 2,500 endangered languages by five levels of vitality: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. This free, browsable resource complements a print version to be released next month. From UNESCO's announcement:

For example, the Atlas states that 199 languages have fewer than ten speakers and 178 others have 10 to 50. Among the languages that have recently become extinct, it mentions Manx (Isle of Man), which died out in 1974 when Ned Maddrell fell forever silent, Aasax (Tanzania), which disappeared in 1976, Ubykh (Turkey) in 1992 with the demise of Tevfik Esenc, and Eyak (Alaska, United States of America), in 2008 with the death of Marie Smith Jones.

Browse UNESCO’s Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger >>

For more on endangered languages, watch Wade Davis' 2003 TEDTalk on cultures at the far edge of the world:

UPDATE: Or check out this less-than-scholarly dictionary of endangered slang >>

Posted by Emily McManus | Permalink

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09 February 2009

Unveiling: TED's plans for subtitles, transcripts, translations

Last week at TED2009, we unveiled the next phase of TED.com, which will bring TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world. The new features -- slated to launch next month -- will bring subtitles and interactive transcripts to all the talks, and will allow anyone, anywhere, to translate any talk into any language.

Rather than simply translate talks into a handful of major languages, we're developing an open, crowd-sourced solution that puts translation tools in the hands of users. This approach is scalable, and -- importantly -- allows speakers of less-dominant languages an equal opportunity to spread ideas within their communities and in their native tongues.

To seed the site, a number of talks will be professionally translated into a few dozen languages -- including Pashto, Persian, Swahili, Hausa, Thai, Tamil ... From there, we'll tap into the energy and skills of TED viewers worldwide to help us translate the talks. Note: It must be said that this open approach to translation is new, unproven and not entirely easy to implement! But we believe in the power of open-source solutions, and have confidence that the community of passionate TED users worldwide will help us move this program forward.

Along with subtitles, we'll also provide interactive transcripts for each talk, which allow you to select any sentence in the talk, and be taken directly to the appropriate moment in the video. The transcripts will be fully indexable by search engines, revealing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, someone searching on Google for "green roof" would find the moment in architect William McDonough's talk when he discusses Ford's River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter's talk when she spoke of her green roof project in the South Bronx.

If you're interested in joining our budding community of translators, we'd love to hear from you at subtitles@ted.com. TED translators won't be paid for their translation work (just as TED speakers aren't paid to present), but they will be credited by name on TED.com and also receive some other perks.

We're so thrilled by the possibility presented by these new features, and grateful to our sponsor, Nokia, for underwriting the translation program and amplifying our efforts to spread ideas.

Posted by June Cohen | Permalink

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