ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia – For the second time in just over a year, the Mongolian TED Translators gathered at UBean Cafe, in the heart of Ulaanbaatar, to learn and share experiences with one another. While there were some TED Translator veterans in the group, the majority of the attendees were new to the TED translating community.
TED Translators are volunteers who subtitle TED Talks to help extraordinary ideas flow across languages and borders. There are nearly 25,000 translators with 100,000 translations published in 112 languages, including Mongolian. The Mongolian Translators have translated more than 200 TED Talks into Mongolian. With 5 regularly active volunteers and over 200 volunteer translators signed up, the translation community is rapidly growing.
During the gathering, translators discussed recent and upcoming updates around TED Translators project and addressed common challenges and obstacles, such as under-utilised resources, low awareness regarding translated talks, among others. To address these challenges, the Mongolian translation community will be launching short videos about the project and translators, hosting Facebook Live events and “transcribathons” and doing more to promote the translated videos.
A highlight of the meeting was the announcement that Tuya Bat, one of the active translators, was selected to attend TEDWomen 2016 in San Francisco this fall. She will be the third Mongolian to attend a TED conference. These opportunities are a great recognition of the translators’ work and give the volunteers an incredible incentive to be more active, while also connecting the Mongolian translation community with the global translation network.
“My hope for our language community is that more people join and participate in the TED community to spread ideas to those who may not speak English and for the hearing impaired,” says Indra Ganzorig, an active TEDx organizer and Mongolian Language Coordinator, who has been to TEDActive 2015 and TEDSummit 2016.
For more information go to www.TED.com/Translate or www.TEDTranslators.com