Educational institutions around the world have been using TEDx Talks as teaching and learning tools for several years now. At the end of last spring, at the University of Athens, the Department of French Language and Literature’s Translation Tools course devoted part of their studies to subtitling, which led them to translating nine TEDx Talks from their original French to Greek.
Spearheaded by the course’s instructor, Eleni Tziafa, the project started with the students’ collective translation of a talk by Gilda Gonfier at TEDxPointeàPitre 2016. This initial effort unexpectedly forced the class to confront the common subtitling issue of how to proceed when the gender of a subject or an object differs between the two languages involved: Gilda’s talk includes a story in which a man marries Death, who’s typically female in Latin languages like French; in Greek, however, Death is male. One student eventually realized that in the Greek song form called rebetiko, Death is a woman named Charondissa, and so the class adopted her for their translation.
After subtitling Gilda’s talk, the class broke into groups of four to five students in order to translate eight more TEDx Talks from events such as TEDxCannes, TEDxChampsElyseesSalon and TEDxParis, to list a few. Everyone obtained an Amara account for the work, and eight students were designated as coordinators for their respective teams. One student, Christina Aggelopoulou, who was already familiar with translating for TED prior to the course’s project, helped supervise all eight groups.
The effort was a resounding success—so much so that the class arranged a screening of their translated talks for friends, family and university staff on June 8. Among the attendees were the Department of French Language and Literature’s president, as well as TED Translators Maria Perikleous and Chryssa Rapessi, both of whom reviewed the class’s translated talks post-subtitling. During and after the screening, the crowd’s excited interest was palpable, and it’s safe to say that everyone left the gathering inspired to learn more about, and potentially join, TED Translators.
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