Global Translator Community Hangout with Daphne Koller

Original YouTube description:
"Daphne will share a bit about her story and the story of Coursera, and take questions from the crowd."
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About the subtitle tracks:
- English subtitles: only for the Q and A part after Ms Koller's speech so far. Anyone is welcome to complete them.
- "Metadata: Geo" subtitles: for adding synchronized annotations about the verbal content of the hangout. Explanation under "Description" in http://www.amara.org/en/videos/4H50v2EYDXP7/meta-geo/735771/ .

(S. Kuo) Hello everyone and welcome to the GTC's first kick-off hangout on air event.

We're so excited in having [you] join us and to answer your questions live

I am Sébastien, you may have received an email from me

I am the program manager for localization here at Coursera

And I am joined by Eli over here, on your right,

who is Product Manager for International Growth,

as well as Daphne, our illustrious co-founder and President of Coursera.

First off, I want to thank our volunteers.

In just a short two and half weeks since we launched the program,

we've had over (check) 25'000 people who joined across a variety of languages.

The response has been overwhelming and truly impressive

and I am impressed everyday by the dedication

that the Coursera community is showing towards this translation's program.

In that short time, we've already had nine courses translated

70% or more towards completion, which represents over a milion words.

So I want to thank you again and again for your tireless effort and hard work.

So, the structure of today's event:

We'll begin with Daphne giving us a brief welcome

and answering any questions that you may have about Coursera

and our international growth strategy.

Following that, Eli and I will be happy to take questions about the GTC

............. (check) or any other thing that may have to do with your daily interaction (check)

feedback about the translation's program.

In order to ask questions through Google Hangouts on Air,

you'll notice a section on the right that has a 'Ask a question' button.

So if you click on that, it'll allow you to type in your question into the text box

and when you're ready to send it, click 'Submit'.

Eli will be fielding and moderating the questions as they come through.

So, without much further ado, Daphne,

would you like to say something, say hello?

(D. Koller) 2:19 -> 33:34

(Eli Bildner) Great, thanks so much, Daphne, and then again, just to remind everyone here,

so now I will spend some time talking more specifically about the GTC and we'll let you get on with your day

But thanks again for having been with us.
(Koller) Thank you. - Thank you

(Bildner) Just a reminder: if you see questions that are being asked on the ...... (check 33:50)

and that you're really in ........ (check) boost them up so they come to our attention.

And - let's take a quick look at kind of questions have been asked already.

So, I see that there is a great question here about translation quality.

Sébastien, do you want to talk a little about what we're thinking about ensuring translation quality in the GTC

and what kind of procedure ...... (check) on place?

(Kuo) Sure. So, the way we tried to continually up quality of the translations from GTC

is to have sort of a tutoring system for, you know, as individual like volunteers (check)

we rely on you just sort of submit the translations and let us know what you think would be the best translation

but obviously, there is a lot of range of opinions and a lot of different ways you can translate something.

And so, I think it's always important to have at least one person per language

to sort of be that voice and have the final say in deciding,

this is how we want to present translations of our content in this language.

And so, in this capacity, we have a specific role, known as the language coordinator.

Not all languages have this at the moment.

As we scale up the program and learn from the particular needs of each community,

we intend to fill those spots where we can, strategically

and give that person the responsibility of deciding the directions of translation for the language

but also having the daily task of reviewing translations on Transifex,

to make sure that everything is always correct,

but also in line with what they sort of are wanting to project,

like when we have that translated content shown to our international users. (35:56)

(Bildner) Thanks, Sébastien.

I wanted to talk a little bit

-- there's a question here from .... (check) about when language coordinators will be chosen.

So, as Sébastien mentioned, ....... (check) is being totally thrilled and overwhelmed, frankly, with response to the GTC

and are really grateful to everyone.

Part of the challenge for us, now, is that we're a tiny team here ...... (check 36:23)

and we're trying to help kind of enable this program and channel the great work that everyone here is doing.

So, as part of that, we're working a little bit more slowly than I think we would have liked.

But as a first step, we really wanted to bring everyone onto this internal translation portal, these GTC Headquarters,

and also give everyone the ability to just kind of jump into things.

And as Sébastien mentioned, we sort of have this tutorate system

where we work with partners in certain languages

and then, for other languages where we don't have partners yet,

although youknow, we very well might in the future, it's a little bit more unstructured now.

But part of the structure that we will be building into these currently unpartnered languages

is by bringing in language partners

So we've been thrilled to see a lot of interest from people all around in serving as language coordinators.

And over the next week or two, we'll be looking through those applications

and working out procedures to ...... (check) language coordinators.

An idea is that right now, things are very unstructured.

If you -- you know, you just have a list of courses, you can jump in and translate,

there's no one for unpartnered languages to really review

but the idea is that we'll be building out a lot more structure around that

and we think that structure is really effective,

- we've seen it be really effective in our Portuguese and Chinese language communities

that work on this team model, where there are team leaders and they help recruit a team

and then at the end, when the course is finished, the team leaders help review the content

and then you can ensure really high-quality translation,

while also creating a really good experience for everyone participating.

So, that's one model that's worked really well

and we hope to bring some of that into our currently unpartnered languages too.

So again, thank you for your patience in these initital days and couple of weeks

and over the next week (check) we'll be digging much more into the currently unpartnered languages

to help create a more structured and smoother experience around those.

Amazingly -- this is a final note and sorry to talk so much --

you know, we've been totally overwhelmed by how

-- even for these languages where there hasn't been a lot of structure --

how busy ....... (check) and how a lot of you are creating structure in the absence of structure.

So, really, really impressed and grateful for that,

and we're hoping to help a little bit more on our end over the next .... weeks (38:50)

(Kuo) Yes, and I also want to mention that, you know, as we sort of are getting over this, sic, initial

-- I guess I'll catch up in trying to get everyone into the community and get started --

we're freeing up more time to sort of engage with you directly.

I think it's, you know, I think the beauty of -- ....... (check) like you said, Eli -- of crowdsourcing

is the fact that, like, we all have different skills and different interests

and, you know, different amounts of time that we're able to contribute.

And, you know, [to match check], I look at it as our job to figure out

how to best enable everyone to work the way that they want to work together,

and complement those skills.

So, that's sort of the philosophy behind the way that we are approaching

building up this structure of the translations programs.

The other aspect, though, is community,

which I feel like is the primary focus.

And, you know, as we have more bandwidth (check) to sort of personally engage with you,

either through forums or emails, you know, I can see this consistently like

this is a learning experience for a lot of us, you know,

and you know, I -- as the people on the ground, like I want to hear, you know,

your feedback and your ideas, you know,

like Eli mentioned that some people are creating structures on their own

and that is stuff that should be shared with us, you know, so that we can, you know, learn from

how you guys best work and what we can promote to other people

and evolve, so that we take the best of what's happening within the community

and make the entire community better.

(Bildner) Thanks, Sébastien. There's a question here, asked from Luis (check) - thank you Luis.

"Are you going to offer some capacitation for translators?"

I'm not -- I hope I'm answering this as you intended but I think the question is,

"What kind of recognition does Coursera provide for people that are participating in this program?"

And as we tried to mention in different areas in the forums and emails,

we really want to recognize the amazing work that's going on in the community

and so we're doing a number of things for that.

So one is, once you translate, once a member of the GTC translates a certain threshold,

a certain amount of content, they will be recognized on our public site

and we think that this is hopefully a nice way to recognize people putting in time and energy

by recognizing them on our public site on coursera.org/about/meetourtranslators

-- I think that's the URL but we'll make sure that it's clear in our GTC headquarters --

and that's one way.

Another way is by offering certificates.

I know there is another question about, will Coursera have some formal recognition for translators,

and so, for translators who have participated at a certain level,

you'll receive a statement of accomplishment, just like one from a course,

and that's something that we're also open to ............ (check) including,

but as a start, that's just one form of recognition that we want to give, for

-- you know, we -- once we have a little bit more structure,

particularly for languages that are currently unpartnered,

it'll be easier for us to introduce some of these reward systems.

So one thing that we're doing both in the Chinese and Portuguese communities now,

where we do have a little bit more structure, is that we are offering team leaders,

so, people who are ...... (check) effort and pouring a lot of energy into translation,

get a free signature track, and that's something that will continue

and then we want to do all sorts of small things too.

I'm sure I'm missing things, l -- let's have a peak on our Global Translator Community Headquarters

and go through this stuff in detail, so I recommend .... (check) check that out

But we want to do lots of small things too, for instance this sort of hangout,

which is only open to you GTC members, other special events, you know,

one thing -- things we've done in the past, are bringing in professors of courses

to do hangouts on air like this,

facilitating regional meetups of translators, maybe providing some, you know, financial support

to make those kinds of regional meetups possible.

And I think there are tons of ways that we can help recognize the work that is going on in the community.

And I think at the end of the day, Sébastien

-- ............ (check) community supportive of the people who are involved in it --

so, this is really important to us and we really, we welcome your feedback and any ideas that you have.

So hopefully, that answers your question, Luis,

and I know that lots of other people are interested in that as well.

Let's take a look at some of these other questions here.

So, there's a good question about choosing courses.

Sébastien, do you want to talk a little bit about how, you know,

how we might allow volunteers to help choose the courses that we're working on?

(Sébastien) Errh, totally. So just some background about

-- some insight into how we choose the courses that we currently translate,

because I realize that's, like, a little bit "black box" at the moment.

We work with either partners in different countries, like you already mentioned,

or using analytics data to just sort of understand the needs of various populations

and determine the appropriateness of courses

and that's sort of like the primary driver of how we decide that we want to translate a course.

And then, even before that happens, a lot of --

course instructors, you know, they are ultimately the ones that can --

we work with course instructors to enable courses for tranlation, right?

And so, in order to make sure that translation work is not,

I don't (check) want to say, like, wasted,

but we work with course instructors to make sure that their course content is stable,

as in, like, it will be reused in the future and won't change significantly,

so that, like, the translation work that you guys will put in

won't be just eliminated if they just decide to change individual modules.

And so, there's sort of a discussion process here about, like,

selecting the courses and making sure that they are appropriate for translation.

And then, to get to your specific question, I think that having a feedback module

for community members to tell us what they want to see translated is really important

and something that is on our, like, near-future road map.

I don't know if it will be like a Google form, or something in the forums,

but I think it's really important to collect that kind of -- those requests from people

who actually are the people who would be most interested in taking those courses.

And so, good idea, something we've already thought about and hope to implement soon.

(Bildner) Thanks, Sébastien. A really fundamental and important question from Tasia.

Tasia asks: "I'm not sure how to get started. Do we get assigned to a project or do we choose one?

What should we do. Thanks."

Thank you, Tasia. So, right -- so, basically, this is how it works:

so, you're part of the GTC community, you're part --

you've access to this internal private translators' portal, the Global Translator Community Headquarters.

And once you come on the Headquarters, there are different features for each language community.

And the pages explain how to get started within that language community

and each language community will be a little bit different.

That's part of, you know, in designing the program we wanted maintain flexibility.

So, for instance, if you want to join the Chinese language community

if you're a Chinese speaker,

we work with a partner, a wonderful partner, Guokr, in China

and so, you go to the page and Guokr explains how to join the Guokr program.

Our Portuguese community, which is managed by Tatiana,

I don't know if Tatiana is here today, but thank you for all the amazing work you're doing,

our friends of the Lemann Foundation in Brazil.

This is a Brazilian Portuguese community.

There is a page for that, you go to that page, and then you can apply to work on a particular program.

So they work on a team-based model.

Right now, as I mentioned before, besides Portuguese and Chinese and Russian

-- I'm sorry, so Russian ..... our friends at ABBYY --

have a system where you go to a different platform outside Coursera

and it's a kind of crowdsourcing model, so you can add a sentence,

or upload or download existent translations, it's a really really wonderful platform

and their page on the Coursera Translator Headquarters explains

how to get started on that.

So, if you're not from one of those communities right now, we have other pages,

our page for Other Languages and Spanish, which is also currently still a little bit more "free for all" (check)

and again, we'll be building in structure to that by this language coordinators mechanism.

So once language coordinators come onboard, there'll be more structure in these communities as well.

But for now, you should feel free to jump in to Transifex,

which is our main translation platform, and just start working on translations.

And we realize that there are going to be inconsistencies in the courses,

that these courses need to be reviewed,

but very quickly, we will get a language coordinator system moving,

and a reviewer system in place and so, things will be better on that part.

That's a summary of how you should get started translating.

(Sébastien) And it's also worth mentioning that we've listed a few projects

that represent some of those most popular courses on Coursera

under that Other Languages tab, and so, even if you want, like, more --

if you just want to dive in and like, choose a course out of the vast number of courses

that we are offering for translation, then that's also a good starting point.

(Bildner) Thanks. There is a good question here about native language course transcripts.

By the way, another housekeeping note: I see it's already 8:50 a.m. PST,

so, Sébastien and I will chat for another 10 minutes.

There are definitely questions we are not going to get to, but we'll go through the questions

and we'll make sure that any questions that are, you know, that need to be answered,

are answered in the discussion forums of the GTC portal.

We'll do this again, I think it is a great mechanism for sharing information with our community

Thanks again to everyone for being here.

That said, let's take a couple more questions.

So about the English language transcripts.

So how it works right now is when a -- so Coursera is a platform.

Our university partners use the platform and when they create content on the platform,

when they add videos to the platform, they can request captioning, native-language captioning for those videos,

When they request captioning, that goes to a company that we work with,

that does human language-captioning of videos.

So then people listen to the videos and actually,

humans write out the words that are being spoken on the screens.

Now, the people who are doing these captions, they are not subject-matter experts,

so, for instance in the course on Machine Learning, you know,

they're probably going to get some words wrong, there are going to be grammatical mistakes

and, you know, one of the challenges that I realize, that we certainly realize is a challenge,

is that English transcripts are not perfect.

We think that they've improved a lot, we've worked with this provider that we use to improve that.

I don't know if any, if actually some of you had been on the platform for a couple of years

and saw the transcripts back in 2012,

and maybe you can tell that they have gone better -- I hope so.

But one thing that we'd really love to do in the future

is that native English speakers participate in this translation program as well

and work on correcting the English language transcription,

verifying that as corrected (check).

This is somewhat difficult technically and we don't really have an infrastructure for it

-- infrastructure or a program for it right now,

but I think it's a great idea, it's something that we'd love to do,

because we realize that as Aurelia (check) says, it does make translation harder,

because you have to consult the videos as you're going through the transcripts.

So, thanks for the question. Definitely agreeing and would love to --

and we're planning on working on it in the future.

Alright. Other questions.

Sorry, looking through the great questions here.

Sébastien, one for you: "Is there any Coursera-approved information

on tech details of translating subtitles, such as, what is the longest line that would fit into a screen?

Other kinds of technical details about using the platform, or maybe kind of translation best practices?

(Kuo) Ehm, yeah, I mean, as like, I think I can, like, if you just follow sort of the --

like general translation best practices, they should cover almost any issues that you'll face.

I think one will be working with something as, I want to say like a rigid format like subtitles,

you know, there's not a whole lot of margin for errors.

So the advice that I would give for translating is that, you know,

first and foremost, like, you know, consider the semantic meaning of the text that you're translating.

So, if you are in Transifex and you see the subtitles, you'll see that they're grouped by sort of lines,

where it, like, the screen, the individual sentences that will come up at a time,

and a lot of people sort of, like, fall into this trap of like,

"Oh I need to, like, format my translations in, like, exact same line breaks"

or like, where, like, the English sentence, like, starts on a new line

and I would say, don't give yourself a headache like doing that, you know,

I've seen like a lot of trans-- innovative (check) translators, like,

take source text and translate it into for example Russian,

and they will rearrange the sentences so it makes more sense in Russian.

And so, feel free to do that if you feel, like, that is what is valuable for you as a native speaker.

In terms of length, I would also try -- that's kind of the one concern I would advise for,

like try to stick within, or under the length of the subtitles,

because subtitles, if you go on too long, it can impact the readability

and so, always err on sort of shorter translations

and use the source text as your bar to measure against.

And then, you know, as I've been sort of explaining through Transifex

when people submit a translation, I try to keep a list of sort of these, like, issues where that came from,

I haven't noticed very many so far, but if you do have questions,

feel free to sort of write.

I can even actually start a sort of, like a Translation Best Practices forum within our GTC,

just keep that discussion going and collect your feedback and, you know,

help you guys with sort of the daily questions you might have about the work that you do.

(Bildner) Thanks, Sébastien. Another question here from Hunadahs

about promoting courses.

So, you know, the Translation Community translates a course,

the course is now available in another language.

a) how does this work?

And b) how do you students on Coursera know that that course is now available in this other language?

So, Sébastien, do you want to field that one, so how does,

how do courses get from the translation platform to the Coursera class site?

And then, how do students on the class site know that these courses are now available in a new language?

(Kuo) Sure. So, once a course's content is both complete and reviewed,

which are two separate sets on Transifex, we actually have an automated script

that sort of checks for these two things to be true, and then we'll, you know,

import the translated subtitles to that course's class site on Coursera.

And so, first and foremost, as, when you visit like the class page

that kind of introduces the course information,

there'll be a little, like, a module on the right that displays information about the course.

And one of those facets is available subtitles.

And so you'll see, if there's available subtitles for Chinese and Spanish,

then it'll say "English, Chinese and Spanish subtitles."

And so, that's kind of the first point where somebody would notice something about that (check)

And then also, as it works on YouTube, like while you're watching a video,

there'll be a sort of a closed caption / subtitle button

and hopefully, you know, people will see that and click it

and see that there's the list of, like, available subtitles,

and one that may match, like the one that they're trying to look for.

We also work with course instructors to sort of have them,

like a lot of course instructors, you know, market and promote their own courses themselves

and so, you know, through our partnership managers and also us,

like, we work very closely with them to sort of keep them abreast about translation progress

and you know, let them know, like oh, like these language subtitles (check) are available

and so that they can also promote that to their students outside of Coursera

or on Coursera itself through an e-mail or their forums.

(Eli Bildner) Thanks, Sébastien. So let me just answer a couple more questions very quickly

and then wrap things up.

So there is a great question about translating the user interface,

" Is it possible to translate that with Transifex?"

So right now, we work with professional translators to translate our user interface

and in the future it's something we'd love to consider opening up to the community as well.

You know, part of, I guess -- what we're thinking is that once the community develops and grows, that

-- and matures and there is more structure in it -- and that will be the appropriate time

to open up the interface.

Because obviously, the interface is something that's very visible

and, you know, it's really important that the quality is super-high.

Right now, we're still working on improving the technical aspects of translating the user interface.

It's actually somewhat tricky, when you pull down the text from the interface to a translation form,

making sure that there is enough context there to translate it.

So, you know, for instance, sole example:

you know, someone reported a translation error the other day

where it said "There are three days left to register for signature track."

And "left" was translated as, in French, as the word meaning, physically left.

And, you know, clearly, this is a big problem but on our translations platform,

that string "left" was in isolation and was used in two separate locations,

so it actually takes a lot of work, technically and programatically

to make sure that the interface translations work well and you don't have silly errors like that.

So, it's something we'd love to do in future. Thanks for the great question, Leonardo.

Another question about: "Currently, most of the translations are English course to other languages,"

you know, would we consider going the other way around?

Great question: the answer is definitely yes.

Already, you know, I've seen some amazing things.

Our Chinese community has translated Russian and is now working on Russian and French courses,

translating them into Chinese or adding Chinese subtitles: totally amazing

and we'd love to introduce other language pairs in the near future.

Again: on the road map and and once the community matures a little bit,

it's something that we definitely want to do.

I would love to work on translating Chinese courses: I speak Chinese

[blurred] some amazing Chinese courses on our platform

and I'd love to see those available.

So, thanks for the great question, Yufan. And--

(Kuo) You know, Eli, it'd be pretty cool one day for you to lead a Chinese community

-- GTC Community --- Google Hangout On Air, your Chinese is really impressive.

As a native speaker I can say that.
(EB overlaps - incomprehensible)

(Bildner) Yes, that would be fun with me and Kuo co-partners.

There's another question about Chinese, I think this is a broader question about --

the question is, you know, obviously there are different dialects of Chinese,

there's Cantonese, there is, you know, traditional characters and simplified characters,

slightly different usages in, say, Taiwan and Mainland: how do we deal with that?

I think there's a broader question of, you know,

there is Brazilian Portuguese and there is European Portuguese, you know,

what kind of Spanish are we accepting on the platform?

These are all great questions and these are things that we'll kind of need to work out on a case-by-case basis.

You know, we'll talk about this more in our forums but, you know,

we think that it makes sense

to have separate languages for European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, for instance,

that it'll just be a clearer and cleaner experience for both students and translators

and certainly, there are things that can be done

in converting from Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese, programmatically,

but, you know, that's something that we'll need to consider as well.

So, great question from Wah, thank you for asking it, and the answer is that

we'll need to work this out on a case-by-case basis.

Let's see if there's any really quick questions that we can answer.

I think, because we're at 9 o'clock and I want to be respectful of everyone's time,

and so I think we should probably wrap this up and again,

we'll look through the questions that are outstanding and I'll make sure that any, kind of fine ones (check)

are answered in the forums or in other channels.

For my part, I just want to thank everyone for being here today.

I know it's probably crazy time zones, some of you are turning in at, you know, 11 p.m.,

and others at 3 a.m., and ......................... (check) sometimes.

But we're really, really grateful for everyone being here and spending the time with us,

asking great questions, and for all your work.

Thanks for inviting Daphne and for the rest of the time i'll share with you, Sébastien,

are there any final words you wanted to add as well.

(Kuo) Yeah, I mean, you know, everyday I am super-impressed with the dedication

from both Coursera learners and our GTC members.

You know, as a person who works in localization, languages has always been my passion, like,

since I was a little kid.

I would go to public libraries and take out, like phrasebooks,

just to sort of, like, look at these weird words and try to understand what they mean.

And I think one of the most gratifying things about building out a community like this

is that, you know, reading through all your responses, especially to that question on the application

that's like (check): "Why do I want to translate?"

you know, I see that there are so many people like me, like you, that are really --

that not only believe in Coursera's mission of increasing the accessibility of education

but also, really believe in the value of translation and community building.

And so, I just want to let you guys know that Eli and I are committed

to sort of -- to build out a program that not only lets you shine and lets you contribute back to Coursera,

but also, you know, take that work and, you know, use it to make other Coursera learners

more enabled to access our really great content. So, thank you.

(Eli Bildner) Okay, well, as we say, thank you, gracias, спасибо, actually we could go on,

but we really appreciate everyone being here, and we'll see you, see you out.

(Kuo) Definitely. Thanks.