Today, we’re fea­tur­ing a guest piece by Tony Yet, a Chi­nese stu­dent, who is help­ing lead an effort to bring TEDTalks to Chi­na. This is part of a larg­er TED Open Trans­la­tion Project, which wants to move  TEDTalks “beyond the Eng­lish-speak­ing world by offer­ing sub­ti­tles, time-cod­ed tran­scripts and the abil­i­ty for any talk to be trans­lat­ed by vol­un­teers world­wide.” Tony speaks very elo­quent­ly about how he got involved with this project and what he hopes to achieve, and how the con­nec­tions between East and West can hope­ful­ly become clos­er. Take it away Tony and check out his web site TED­toChi­na…

I have been watch­ing TEDTalks for near­ly three years. I orig­i­nal­ly found them by serendip­i­ty on iTunes. The very first few talks (notably from Al Gore, David Pogue and Sir Ken Robin­son) grabbed me like a mag­net, and I could­n’t resist watch­ing them again and again. There were quite a few sen­tences and phras­es in each of these talks that fell on a deaf ear for me, as I could­n’t quite under­stand some slang Eng­lish. I worked with the TED videos at home with a com­put­er and a note­book. And yes, I’ve got to admit that I am tak­ing each TED screen­ing as a valu­able learn­ing expe­ri­ence, and they did help me in broad­en­ing my hori­zons and enrich­ing my under­stand­ing of the world.

Then, in the sum­mer of 2008, I decid­ed that mere­ly watch­ing was not enough, at least not enough in com­ing to a full under­stand­ing of the talks, as many of the mean­ings are hid­den in the seman­tics. Thus I embarked upon a project to trans­late TEDTalks into Chi­nese. I start­ed with some famil­iar ones, like Erin McK­ean’s talk on redefin­ing dic­tio­nar­ies, and Alex Stef­fen’s talk on a bright green future. It proved to be a mind-enrich­ing expe­ri­ence. Before mak­ing any attempt to trans­late a talk, I would probe into the depth of the back­ground of the speak­er and rel­e­vant con­cepts and ideas. This was a great learn­ing process. It helped me build up a clear pic­ture of the talk and its sig­nif­i­cance, and also reshape my under­stand­ing of many ideas across the whole spec­trum of arts and sci­ence.

As I was push­ing for­ward with my endeav­or, I found that it would be bet­ter if we can have more peo­ple join­ing in this joy­ful jour­ney of intel­lec­tu­al min­ing through trans­la­tion. So I post­ed the mes­sage on a com­mu­ni­ty web­site for trans­la­tors. Then it start­ed to get kicked off. Peo­ple jumped in the boat and offered help. It was a most grat­i­fy­ing expe­ri­ence to know that your efforts in spread­ing the idea of TED gen­er­at­ed so much ener­gy and so rich a wel­com­ing response. (more…)