Translated ideas at scale
How TED transformed their global video subtitling and localisation
About TED
Devoted to the mission of ‘spreading ideas’, TED is a global, non-profit organisation that presents short, powerful talks covering almost all topics in over 100 languages. Captioning and subtitling video is nothing short of mission-critical for TED to ‘change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world’ via the power of ideas. From the TED Conferences to their TED Talks, from the global TEDx and TED Translators communities to the TED-Ed lesson series — all are driven by a single goal: How can we best spread great ideas?
Events, Education, Technology
Industry
Media
Region
Challenges
TED's localization team face an enormous challenge in their video subtitling and localization. An outdated legacy platform and DevOps environment, with a hugely complex review and approval workflow, was simply not fit for purpose of supporting 40,000 global volunteer linguists to accurately subtitle huge volumes of video. TED looked to the market for a new solution, one that could support them for the future and evolve with their complex business needs at a vast scale.
"CaptionHub provides our volunteers with a platform to create high-quality subtitles quickly. Now, our global audiences can access big ideas faster than ever before."
Jenny Zurawell
Director of Localisation
Solutions
CaptionHub delivered a massive workflow transformation. A custom integration project deeply linking TED's linguist community platforms, video assets and CaptionHub – a 6-month business change programme that culminated in the migration of tens of thousands of videos, and onboarding of 40,000 linguists - resulted in the successful launch of CaptionHub. Now, TED's 40,000 linguists can use CaptionHub's self-service workflow to translate subtitles from auto-generated original language captions (originally transcribed via API).
It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome TED and their huge team of linguists to CaptionHub. We’re proud that such an important institution has chosen CaptionHub to reach an even wider global community via our platform.
Tom Bridges
CEO, CaptionHub
TED in numbers
38,948 TED translators using CaptionHub: TED translators is a global population of volunteer translators committed to TEDs mission of spreading ideas; 186,431 Translations to date: translations at a global scale, every day; 3 billion TED talk views: The constantly growing resource of TED, TED x and TED-Ed talks are viewed or listened to more than three billion times annually.