Global Translator Community Hangout with Daphne Koller

(Sébastien) Intro start to -> 2:18

(Daphne Koller) 2:19 -> 33:34

(Eli Bindner) 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 .......

But thanks again for having been with us.

(Koller) Thank you.

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

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

And - let's take a quick look at any 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?

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

is to have sort of a tutoring system for, you know, as individual act 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, it's 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 for the language

and 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 want to project (check),

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

(Bindner) 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 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 possibility 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 ....... (check) might very well in the future, it's a little bit more ....... (check) 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 all around in serving as language coordinators.

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

The idea is we'll be building out (check) a lot more structure around that

and within... structures....

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

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

and 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 ...... (check) structure.

So, really, really impressed and grateful for that,

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

(Sébastien) 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 translation (check) 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 forms 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, like, 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. (40:37)

(Bindner) Thanks, Sébastien. There's a question here, asked from Luis (check)

"Are you going to offer some consultation 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 for 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 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 a lot 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 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 yes, I know that lots of other people are interested in that as well. (43:42)

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

So, 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 ................... (check) 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 --

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

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

I want to say (check), 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 that 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. (45:16)

(Bindner) 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 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,

.......... Chinese speaker (check)

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

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

Our Portuguese community, which is managed by Tatiana,

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

our friends of the Lemann Foundation in Brazil.

This is a pretty important (check) 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 it, a team-based model (47:39)

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, 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 pages,

our page for Other Languages and Spanish, which is also ..... a little bit more ...... (check 48:17)

and again, we'll be building instructions 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 (check 48:54)

It's not (check) 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. (49:24)

(Bindner) 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 other 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 (check 14:56)

Thanks again to everyone for being here.

That said, let's take a couple of 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 captions, native-language captioning for those videos (check).

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 as a challenge,

is that English transcripts are not perfect.

And 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 51:19)

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 (51:47)