By all means that is all with good intention, however if their objective is to get high quality content fast, it’s much better to follow the low bar of entry system but introduce a few extra layers of volunteer reviews before the content goes live.

‘With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’.

In that case, ‘With enough eyeballs, all typos are rid-dable’.

(I wonder if that’s mirrored in other languages? Maybe it’s a minority language thing?)

At the beginning of these projects it’s just about having a lone zealot to smear a blank page into life. When enthusiasm is more important than knowledge!

The fine tuning can wait. I think it was Eric Raymond who originally said “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – love it. If anyone hasn’t read The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay, then do so.

I liked the idea of dotSUB when I first saw it and watched a few videos. But when I visited your translate link today and tried to enter some text it didn’t even save at all on my browser (Firefox). It’s got some errant JavaScript refreshing every couple of seconds.

Therefore I can’t work with dotSUB, sorry, at least for the moment. I’ll be back when it works, even if it’s tad clunky.

Flawed translation is my middle name.

So the key is building trust within a team, creating strong bonds between co-translators, and facilitating positive interactions. That means the interface is important as it has to allow for good team management and not just present the text for translation. Given the right tools, I see no reason why it should be “an order of magnitude” harder, but to be honest, I don’t know if the right tools exist – I haven’t seen them, but then, I haven’t looked that hard.

I found out this morning that I had managed to jump through TED’s hoops and am now in the DotSub interface, which I can’t say I like very much. It’s only vaguely collaborative, and is missing many of the social features I would expect to see in a truly collaborative platform. Colour me deeply unimpressed.

If anyone is interested, I’ve started translating here:

http://dotsub.com/translate/a90b7f77-60f2-4a83-8f09-4e3656032c62/wel

Charbax, I think you’re overestimating what current technology can achieve.

We don’t care if speech recognition has mistakes, or if automatic translation has mistakes! Youtube has hundreds of millions of users, let them all participate in correcting the speech recognition and translation mistakes in some type of Wiki sort of way! And let the translators even be able to earn money as people can pay to request faster subtitle translation correction to be posted by an international group of open translators!

When Google activates automatic subtitle generation and translation, Youtube is going to be 10x huger even!

You say that collaborative translation is a “bit harder”, but I’d say it’s an order of magnitude harder to do properly. See, for example, the trainwreck that is the Rosetta project at Launchpad.net; at least, it was two or three years ago, the last time that I wasted dozens of hours of my time using it. Maybe it has improved radically since, but all it achieved for our team was to pollute our well researched, corrected and proof-read work with hundreds of “corrections”, incorrect additions, and very little of any actual substance; and then it removed all the comments from our translation files where we’d carefully documented our research, and also left no indication of who was responsible for which edits. Thanks guys, three months wasted.

Now, if Canonical can get it so badly wrong — when so many things about Ubuntu seem to be spectacularly right — I can’t blame anyone else for doing it traditionally.

It’s an interesting problem, and one that I think can be solved, but I’ve yet to see a good implementation of a solution. Have you? I’d love to give it a once-over if you have.

All asking for credentials does is weed out drive-by participants who are unlikely to really do much, but as they are self-weeding-out by their nature – the fact that they’d be unlikely to finish and submit a translation – I’m not sure that TED are achieving anything. Other than feel that they are retaining control, perhaps.

I’d rather see a genuinely open translation project that used the power of collaborative technology to welcome all comers and help ensure that the results are high quality. It might take a bit more effort, and be a little bit harder, but it would actually be a valuable project for them to engage in. Particularly if it was open source. The, maybe, they could use the words “open translation project” and actually mean it.

I agree with you that it is possible to produce high quality work collaboratively, be it translation or something else, but you’d have to admit that it’s also quite possible — and more frequently the case — that the result is incomplete, badly done, half-arsed and unreadable; and this, presumably, is not the image that TED is hoping to project to the non-English speaking world.

If they don’t have an in-house team to do QA on the finished work — or to distinguish a work in progress from something worth publishing — then I think it’s quite reasonble to ask for some credentials.