Imagine the world’s most captivating TED Talks at your fingertips, voiced in your own language. At TED, we believe that ideas are universal and that they should be accessible to everyone. Yet language barriers often hinder access to our talks, many of which are delivered in English. To tackle this issue head-on, we’re expanding our […]
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 […]
At TEDSummit in June, we featured a talk by a young Syrian architect, Marwa Al-Sabouni. In it, she shares an important and original insight about how the roots of conflict can be traced, among other better-studied reasons, to misdirected and divisive urbanism. She offers the example of her own country, where violent conflict has been […]
“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.
It’s the Saturday before the start of TEDSummit, and while the conference staff are prepping and speakers are rehearsing, a few of the tribes gathering this week in Banff got things started a little early. The TEDx Global Forum, an advisory group of TEDx hosts from all over the world, met up on Saturday to think on big questions […]
Now we’ve completely rebuilt the TED Talks Android app to help our global audience search, find and watch talks in their local languages. The rebuilt-from-the-ground-up Android app works natively in 24 languages, so if your phone setting is in native Japanese, you’ll now get the full TED experience with a Japanese interface and more than 2,000 TED Talks subtitled in Japanese — and even multi-language search.
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 […]
By Kate Torgovnick May and Krystian Aparta Music is the universal language. So why, then, do so many songs get translated? Sometimes, bands adapt their lyrics into English to reach international audiences—which explains why so few of us can sing ABBA in the band members’ native Swedish. Other times, songs are adapted into local languages […]
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 […]
TED.com volunteers translate talks into many languages, from commonly used (like Spanish and Mandarin Chinese) to a few less expected (like Klingon). And two new languages just joined our library: Latgalian and Tatar. Latgalian is officially the 104th language on TED.com. It’s spoken in Latgale, a region in the eastern part of Latvia, by […]