Earlier this month, the TED Conference announced its Open Translation Project, which aims to translate, subtitle, and add transcriptions to its popular series of TED Talks:

Every talk on TED.com will now have English subtitles, which can be toggled on or off by the user. The number of additional languages varies from talk to talk, based on the number of volunteers who elected to translate it. Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point.

The Open Translation Project is powered by volunteer translators, an idea that Ethan Zuckerman calls social translation -- "translation of online information by users around the world, motivated more by community recognition and appreciation than by money." Ethan's own Global Voices site uses social translation to filter, translate, and contextualize blogs posts and other citizen media.

As part of an upcoming story about online translation and the multilingual web, Nora talked to Ethan about Global Voices, TED, and the relative merits of machine translation and social translation. A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 3 and 6 episode of Spark, but you can download the MP3.

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