Motivation to collaboration in TED Open Translation Project Online publication date: Sun, 05-Apr-2015
by Lidia Cámara de la Fuente
International Journal of Web Based Communities (IJWBC), Vol. 11, No. 2, 2015
Abstract: The distributed nature of online volunteers enabled global organisations to mobilise talents from around the world. The past decade has witnessed an expansion of virtual collaborative efforts within the crowdsourced audiovisual translation communities. The aim of this work is to characterise motivational factors driving volunteer translators to engage in these endeavours. I will focus on TED, a global community which hosts video recordings of experts (TED Talks) and where people interact with each within a virtual community. Linked to TED, the Open Translation Project aims to make its full video library accessible to the non-English speaking world, by providing access to translated subtitles on every single TED Talk video. Circa. 12,000 volunteers translate audiovisual content of TED talks into more than 100 languages. I asked a group of its participants who range across 35 different languages and are geographically distributed over four continents, to pinpoint key motivation factors for becoming volunteer translators.
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