At TED, speakers aren’t the only celebrities; some of the biggest heroes sit in the audience. Case in point: Our volunteer TED Translators, who donate their free time to translate TED Talks into their local languages, making the talks accessible to millions of people every day. Ahead of TEDGlobal 2017 in Tanzania, we invited these […]
First, watch this wonderful new promo for TED’s mobile app — a wander through five countries and communities, linked by a love for great ideas. TED’s filmmakers asked the help of five TEDx organizers to make a video highlighting TED’s mobile app, the result became something much more: visual evidence that ideas bring people together. “We […]
On Tuesday night, we published a very special TED Talk, recorded for TED2017 by His Holiness Pope Francis in Vatican City. In it, His Holiness comments on the state of the world as we find it today and shares some ideas on how we can find hope for the future in togetherness. A talk of this […]
“Cowness hasn’t gone, buffaloness intervened” … and other idioms from around the world, chosen and explained by 47 different TED Translators and illustrated by Masahito Leo Takeuchi.
Ayana Ishiyama always thought she wanted to be a journalist. Two years ago, when she left her hometown in northern Japan to study abroad in the US, she signed up for journalism courses and wrote articles for the school newspaper to sharpen up her English skills. But while she loved interviewing people and sharing their […]
Camille Martinez is a native English speaker who’s fluent in Spanish. In her career, she’s run a language school, worked in medical translation and interpreting, and even started a translation company. But in TED’s Open Translation Project, Martinez occupies a key role: English Language Coordinator. She is one of a handful of volunteers who help […]
It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our TED Translator volunteers translate TED Talks into 116 languages (and counting), they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made […]
The Open Translation Project has a global family of over 18,000 volunteers. But for the Dekkers — living in Sde Warburg, Israel — the OTP family isn’t a figure of speech. They’ve made translating TED Talks into Hebrew a true family affair. Husband and wife Ido and Tal Dekkers have worked on more than 2,000 […]
By Krystian Aparta They say that children learn languages the best. But that doesn’t mean that adults should give up. We asked some of the polyglots in TED’s Open Translation Project to share their secrets to mastering a foreign language. Their best strategies distill into seven basic principles: Get real. Decide on a simple, attainable […]
Shortly after model Geena Rocero gave the TED Talk “Why I must come out,” she was Skyping with an LGBTQ activist in Hong Kong. This activist mentioned how powerful it would be for Chinese speakers to be able to watch the talk. Rocero logged on to TED.com to find out how she could get her […]
By Krystian Aparta When Kazakh journalist Asqat Yerkimbay learned about TED’s Open Translation Project, he realized it could be instrumental in reviving his native tongue. Under Soviet rule, communicating in Kazakh became viewed as a sign of ignorance, and although it regained its standing as the national language after Kazakhstan declared independence in 1991, Russian […]
What’s funny in one language isn’t necessarily funny in another. Maysoon Zayid’s “I got 99 problems … palsy is just one” presented many challenges for TED translators bringing the hilarious talk into their language. As she tells stories from her life as a Palestinian-American comedian with cerebral palsy, Zayid cracks with wordplay. For translators, it’s […]
Happy birthday, Open Translation Project! Our global initiative to bring TED Talks beyond the English-speaking world turned five this week. To celebrate, OTP asked its global network of volunteers—who, by the way, have translated nearly 57,000 talks at this point—to answer a few questions via Twitter. Below, see who they are and why they translate, as […]
The word ‘translate’ means to bring words from one language to another. So you might think that the Open Translation Project — TED’s globe-spanning initiative to bring the ideas from talks beyond the English-speaking world — would only need volunteers who speak multiple languages. But being bilingual is not a necessity. The OTP needs single-language […]
By Krystian Aparta, as told to Kate Torgovnick Silesian is a Slavic language spoken by about 500,000 people in a region of Poland known as Silesia. Because the region had been home to a large German population until World War II, and because it neighbors the Czech Republic, it consists largely of German and Czech […]
“In this place, you can connect to people that have been drawn apart for years by nationalists and the war. You can put them together in the same room and … people are talking about the greater good.” This quote was recorded at the first regional Open Translation Project workshop held in Novi Sad, Serbia, […]