TED Translators get innovative during COVID-19 quarantine // Part 4

On a Saturday near the end of May, members of TED Translators’ international Catalan-language community participated in a virtual translate- and revise-athon. The event was organized by Catalan Language Coordinator (LC) Anna Comas-Quinn. Aside from tackling Catalan-language TED Talk translations and reviews, the online gathering offered a chance for already-active translators to get to know each other better and for the community to welcome new volunteers.

The event kicked off at 10 a.m. CEST and ran for just over two hours. Eight TED Translators—from Barcelona and surrounding areas, as well as the Balearic Islands, Scotland, England, Germany and Norway—linked up on Zoom, introduced themselves to one another, then got to work on translating and reviewing. While the new translators focused on translating talks, the more experienced volunteers busied themselves with reviewing.

Anna, for her part, spent the bulk of the gathering reviewing and approving translated talks. Four talks were reviewed, three were approved and published, and several other translations were completed soon after the event and posted for review on the Catalan-language community’s TED Translators Facebook page.

At the close of the session, all the participants reconnected on Zoom to discuss their respective translations and reviews, share the challenges they’d encountered and to exchange useful translation resources. “Everybody who took part,” Anna told us, “was so motivated by the gathering that we decided it should be a fixture of TED Translators’ Catalan-language community. Our next meetup is scheduled for June 27!”

P.S. If you’d like to host a TED Translators virtual workshop, discussion session, translate-athon, transcribe-athon, or if you’re part of a TEDx team looking to recruit TED Translators for your online event, feel free to reach out to us at translate@ted.com. We’re here to support you!