Udacity, a pioneer of free online education discussed in recent Crotty posts, yesterday announced a partnership with translation platform Amara to translate and subtitle more than 5,000 of its course videos, according to an Amara press release. It sounds very inside baseball, but the partnership means that millions of students from around the world can now receive a free education in their preferred language.
"Video is the central medium that allows online education to flourish globally," noted Nicholas Reville, Amara CEO, in the Amara release. "However, video is harder and more expensive to translate and is not as searchable as text. That’s where Amara comes in.”
As noted in my previous Forbes post on its translation platform, Amara’s radically new crowd-sourced approach to subtitling-- a ‘Wikipedia for subtitles’ -- allows videomakers to break down social, political and cultural barriers to reach a vastly wider global audience.
“We believe education is a basic human right,” said Sebastian Thrun, CEO/Co-Founder of Udacity, in the Amara release. “We have a passionate and growing international student community. We hope that by engaging our users with Amara’s platform, we can make our content more accessible by adapting to our international population's languages. That is ultimately the core purpose of Udacity. We want to democratize education by broadening access.”
With free online courses in Computer Science, Programming, Mathematics, General Science and Entrepreneurship, Udacity has over 700,000 users and an innovative revenue model that includes both certification for completed courses as well as a job referral services. The company has more than 5,500 videos online. Moreover, 90% of Udacity videos have at least one subtitle, while the most popular ones are translated into more than 10 languages.
The Colombian Ministry of IT and Innovation recently announced plans to translate Udacity’s Entrepreneurship course -- "How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad" -- into Spanish, with several other partners in Russia, Japan, and France also in the works.
Since Amara’s launch in 2010, more than 68,000 users have subtitled more than 200,000 videos across over 100 different languages. For example, Amara volunteers subtitled the KONY 2012 video in 30 languages in just two days. TED translates every TED talk into more than 40 languages using Amara and an army of 11,000+ volunteer translators.
The importance of online video translation may not be apparent at first blush. However, as noted by Ben Sargent in reply to my last Forbes piece on Amara, "reaching a global online audience requires a lot more languages than were needed only a few years ago. Common Sense Advisory’s research shows that it takes at least 12 languages now just to reach the 80% threshold. Many top sites now publish in 20 or more languages. Solutions like dotSUB and Amara definitely play an important role in getting critical information into underserved languages."
What's most impressive, however, is that tens of thousands of volunteers are willing to do this arduous translation work for free. Some might call that an abuse of labor. I call it a fair trade for enabling free online education for all.
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