Title: Motivation to collaboration in TED Open Translation Project

Authors: Lidia Cámara de la Fuente

Addresses: School of Arts and Humanities, University of Cologne, Cologne, North Rhine-Westphali, Germany

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.

Keywords: audiovisual translation; digital culture; lifelong learning; online collaboration; subtitling; virtual volunteering; motivation factors; TED Open Translation Project; volunteer translators; virtual communities; online communities; web based communities; translated subtitles; TED Talk videos.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2015.068542

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2015 Vol.11 No.2, pp.210 - 229

Published online: 05 Apr 2015 *

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