Sunday, July 19, 2009

Don't Eat Marshmallows

This a TED talk, Joachim de Posada says, Don't eat the marshmallow yet.


enable subtitles and select Chinese(Simplified)

This is my first translation work as a TED volunteer translator. TED Translation project was launched about a year ago. It has been very successful. With people involved world wide, so many talks have been translated to various languages with high quality. I read an article from TED saying that it was impossible just for TED hired translators to do the job and actually volunteers having done very high quality translation work.

I had been kept watching TED shows almost on daily base during my initial period knowing TED. When I saw this one, I immediately decided to join the translation project to do this talk. It took very quick time to get my translator application approval passed. Then I took about one week to finish this talk. Fortunately, when I was doing the translation, the traditional Chinese just finished the initial translation and was in review stage, I used the version as my reference. That's really helpful since both Simplified and Traditional Chinese are very close.

The review time took quite a while. It took about more than one week to have a reviewer assigned by TED. I think the reviewer is a Chinese from Mainland China. He is very polite and respect to my work. I took some of his revisions, but missed some. Then he marked it as completed by mistake,may miscommunication during our emails. Soon we realized the editor comments in TED. I make a request to pull it back. We took less than one day do to complete it, removed all the editor notes. Finally, the Simplified Chinese subtitle is available on TED. It has been very enjoyable work on web!

Now I just finished another talk and it is in the stage waiting for reviewer. Hopefully it will be available soon.

By the way, when I did my first translation, there were only 7 talks with Simplified Chinese subtitles. Now the number reaches to 34!

During my translation, I also found out that there are quite a few of Chinese web site related to TED, One is YeeYan, which is a web site with a lot Chinese translations from variety of languages. There is one active group about TED talks. I posted my translation there to share TED with people there. Another one is TEDToChina. This site was initialized by a group of Chinese university students in GuangDong Province and it has far more Chinese translations in article format there. Recently they hosted a similar talk conference in GuangZhou with great success. From both sites, I contact a key organizer. His name soon appears on TED translation project.

Here is my post regarding this talk on my Chinese blog at WenxueCity.