Acronym

If you haven’t heard of the TED Conference, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”—and originally, the conference was intended to bring people from those three worlds together. Today, TED has evolved into a small, invitation only conference with a global following online. More than 400 of the conference’s TEDTalks, 18-minute presentations by people from Seth Godin to Jane Goodall, are available online. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Last month TED.com launched its Open Translation Project, which invites viewers to translate the talks into various languages. The effort has already been a remarkable success, and June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, spoke with Mark Athitakis (senior editor of Associations Now, who kindly contributed this post to Acronym) about its evolution into a crowdsourced project, how to channel users’ enthusiasm, and how crowdsourcing has sparked future projects.

What inspired TED to begin translating its talks?

We launched TEDTalks online nearly three years ago, and pretty much as soon as we put TEDTalks out to the world we started to have people ask us to translate them. People were asking us to translate them into other languages, but actually more frequently people were offering to translate them. We would get at least one or two offers a month of somebody saying, “I've translated Ken Robinson’s talk into Polish." They would say, "Well, we did this translation. Do you want it?" But we didn't know what to do with them. We didn't have a system for dealing with them.

So we knew pretty early on that there was a lot of demand and, more interestingly, that there were people who were kind of clamoring to translate for us. So we began thinking about the project at least two years ago. And we committed to it around a year and a half ago. It's been a very long time in development. As we've discovered more and more, it was just an extremely complicated project to create an architecture for what we wanted to do.

Was crowdsourcing always part of the plan? You had people who were willing to volunteer translations, but was it always designed to open the doors to let people contribute?

Yes and no. Crowdsourcing was always going to be a component of it because we knew from the beginning that there were volunteers who were interested and motivated. But initially and for a very long time, I believed that the crux of the project would be based on professional translation, because we take very seriously the task of faithfully translating our speakers' words. For some time I really believed that professional translation was the only way that you could guarantee that kind of quality. I also thought that by having professional translation it would set the bar at the proper level. It would provide an example to the volunteers of the kinds of quality we were shooting for.

I do think in every volunteer project it's important to set examples. But it turns out a lot of my assumptions were wrong. Around six months ago we shifted from a project that was going to emphasize professional translation with some crowdsourced translation, to one that was entirely focused on crowdsourced translation but was seeded with a small amount of professional translation.

I can give a great example of why we've come to really trust in the idea of crowdsourcing. As we were about to launch the site it turned out that one [translator] actually submitted to us a small amount of work that was machine-translated. And within two hours of opening up our site, just our beta site to just our translators, we had three different volunteer translators come to us and say, “There's a problem with this translation—it seems to have been machine-translated. But just give it to me, I'll fix it.”

So we had these errors that were introduced because of a rare, dishonest translation vendor who had submitted to us machine-translated work. And within hours it was identified and corrected by volunteer translators. That really turned on its head everything I thought going in about the roles of volunteers versus professional translators. I really thought that in all cases the professional translators would be leading the way in terms of the quality.

(See part II of this interview for more, including a glimpse of TED’s new “TED X” program.)