I have been participating in TED for a long time, since 2012. I used to download and watch talks, and I was really excited about them. The idea of people coming together to share ideas and summarizing their work and experience in just 20 minutes was amazing.
However, I didn’t know about the OTP (Open Translation Project) until the end of 2012, when I met Dr. Anwar Dafa-Alla, one of the most active TED Talk translators and the founder of TEDxKhartoum. I met him at my college, where I was a student and he was our instructor in one of the courses.
I still remember the first day he came to class. He played a TED Talk video on the projector -Tim Berners-Lee’s talk about how he invented the World Wide Web and told us to watch it and discuss it. Later, he told me about the OTP. I visited the website, started translating talks, and shared them with my friends.
After watching the vast amount of information shared on TED, I often thought about how these videos and their content could be shared with my friends, collaborators, colleagues, and, more broadly, with my nation. The OTP (Open Translation Project) gave me a way to raise my voice through the subtitle platform, allowing me to share these talks with them.
As a language coordinator, I plan to apply the same principle. With the help of social networks, I will invite new volunteers to join the OTP, helping to move the project forward step by step. I will encourage volunteers in my language community to work hard, communicate with one another, and collaborate so that together we can reach a higher level of impact.
