TED; a Technology, Entertainment and Design conference that covers informative and impactful talks by world leaders and inspirational people all around the world, has just recently launched an innovative project that will make their presentations available globally in forty languages along with English subtitles. Their goal is to reach beyond English speaking crowd and let their information be available for all cultures and languages. The great news is, Urdu is one the featured languages.

This is a plus point for Urdu language speakers because there is a huge percentage of people who are comfortable with their mother language and for them, this recent TED Talks launch in Urdu will definitely provide a comfort zone they need. A wide range of population will be able to access, comprehend and share the videos of thought leaders like Al-Gore and Seth Godin while they share their knowledge that was previously limited to few people. It will be great since they will get to see and know these successful and inspiring world leaders sharing their thoughts and ideas about global issues, current and future technologies and design to be implemented in upcoming years. With the wisdom of such people all around the world available locally, it will bound to create a positive impact on us.

This will actually be a collaborative translation, as according to the TED Talk media Executive Producer June Cohen, every TED Talk will now have sub-titles and will have the capacity to be translated in forty languages by the volunteers worldwide. The project has been funded by Nokia to subtitle and index video content online as a step towards a big win for humanity.

Every talk on TED.com already has English subtitles and number of translations will vary according to the number of volunteers who will be elected to translate the talk. Along with subtitles, TED.com also features time coded interactive transcript that are indexable by search engines. So now viewers can watch videos with English subtitles and Urdu transcript or according to their preferred language transcript. As for the quality and validity of translations, according to TED Talk website:

“To help ensure quality, we generate an approved, professional English transcript for each talk. (This is the transcript upon which all translations are based.) Once the talk is translated, we then require every translation to be reviewed by a second fluent speaker before publishing it on TED. TED controls the final “publish” button. All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work.”

So far, 306 translations have been completed and so many are under process. TED Talk deserves a round of applause for their outstanding project. You can find out more about this on NPR and All Thing Digital as well.