TED, the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference made up of short talks by brilliant people from around the world, is now making its archives available with subtitles in more than 40 languages. This is the kind of news that could make a real impact in a lot of peoples' lives.
TED Talks are brain stretching, tear-jerking, 18 minute nuggets of emerging wisdom. The new translation project is sponsored by Nokia and uses the awesome volunteer-powered translation service DotSub.
]]> Unfortunately, the multi-lingual subtitles aren't available in the embedded TED video players. They are in DotSub's usual players, though that service uses an iframe. (Update: June Cohen from TED drops by in comments to let us know that this will change. "We'll actually have subtitles available on our embeddable player, in around a week's time. We'll follow that with subtitled MP4s you can download (maybe 6 weeks later). Watch this space..." Thanks June!)If you speak languages other than English, the rest of the DotSub site is quite worth a visit as well.
So far 306 translations have been completed, hopefully more will be performed soon. Bringing these TED videos to more people around the world is a big win for humanity. It is truly remarkable how TED has gone from a closed gathering for the global elite to becoming far, far more publicly available. Andy Carvin has some more details over at NPR.