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TED Talks Translations

tedTED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, started out in 1984 and has since then widened the focus even further and is today seen as a global community of thinkers and visionaries that try to get a deeper understanding of the world. TED Talks was introduced to provide access to some of the talks online so that users from all over the world had the chance to view these speeches without having to attend a TED conference. Up until recently all speeches were only available in the English language which might have kept users from other parts of the world from accessing the resources.

This has recently changed with Ted Talks Translations which is a community driven translation project. The TED Open Translation project is home to 1048 translators who translate TED Talks into 42 different languages. The main page contains information about the current state of translations.

ted talks

The most popular languages are Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew and Portuguese followed by the rest. It is possible to filter TED Talks by language. Translations are provided as subtitles and transcripts. Each video on the TED website contains a pulldown menu which allows to add subtitles to the video.

ted talks translations

The translations are interesting to users who have a hard time understanding spoken English. It makes the talks more accessible and easier to understand. Some talks worth viewing:

Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals
Matthew Child: 9 life lessons from rock climbing
David Pogue on cool phone tricks
Bill Gates unplugged

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Sunday May 17, 2009 -
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Responses so far:

  1. rruben says:

    One thing that I don’t like about ted is that if you download a talk and put it on a dvd to watch it on tv, it won’t play because it’s formatted as hd I guess. I have tried to convert it to almost any format, but nothing helps.

    Not a smart choice imo.

  2. rruben says:

    Okay thanks, I will try it with DVD Flick.

    Before I have used Magic video converter to convert it to almost every format they support, but that didn’t help because it stays in HD and my dvd player doesn’t support HD although it does support all the formats I’ve tried to convert it to.

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