Today the "TED Open Translation Project" has been announced publicly. Before that, people were invited to participate in a top secret TED project. Later, it was revealed that the secret project was about translating your favourite talks into your native/near native language so that larger communities can benefit from "ideas worth spreading".Now, I certainly do not think that every idea presented at the TED conference is worth spreading, but I want to continue participating, as some/many of them certainly are (e.g., Cameron Sinclair, Barry Schwartz, William Kamkwamba, etc.).
Often times, I watch a talk and think that it would be great if people with some kind of financial power could watch this, but then they do not speak or understand English. Now these barriers are being lifted.
With this great project I can even enhance my Hindi skills, just by watching new talks with their Hindi translations. A good alternative to Hindi movies??
Some of you, who follow my other blog, will know that I'm occasionally teaching programming to small groups of undergraduate students. Often, during the class I feel that I'm doing something wrong, because my students seem to understand the things in the class, but cannot solve the problems I give them as homework. Today I came across this quote, which pretty much sums the reason for that up: