We Feel Fine

I’ve been participating in the TED Open Translation Project for a while now, about six months, and basically what happens is that there is a list of talks you can choose from to translate and to review, so you request to do either of those two things and wait for the link to be provided to start working on the talk. Obviously, the most recent talks are the most sought for and there is nothing more frustrating than getting a message in the inbox saying something like ‘we’re sorry, but the talk you’ve requested has been assigned to another translator’.

What I do is to first see what the most recent posts are. Then, I watch the talk and see how difficult it is to translate and, most importantly, if it is relevant to me and to other people, having always in mind the question “Is it worth watching?” I’ve gladly had the opportunity to translate amazing presentations, such as the alarming Jeremy Jackson’s talk about the damage being done to the ocean — this talk was actually linked to a number of other websites; the thought-provoking Robert Neuwirith’s talk showing an incredible forecast: by 2050, one third of the global population will live in slums and these will be the cities of the future; the uplifting Sophal Ear’s talk and his family quest to escape the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. But I guess my all-time favourite — I know, so far — has to be this one: about “We Feel Fine.”

This Jonathan Harris’ riveting presentation is about collecting stories, done via web or in person. He came up with a mechanism that collects tiny parts of stories on the web containing the words “feel” and “feeling”. You can visualise them in tiny dots floating on the screen, through statistics and many other ways. Here are some examples of bits of stories randomly selected from the site:

“I feel so good after crying and letting it out”

“I feel so stupid”

“I feel God isn’t working in my dad’s life because nothing has changed so far I know God works on his own time”

“I feel my life is a tragedy because my life is losing out there is no hope and I have no joy”

“I did a diet sort of but every time I go on these diets I end up eating more and feeling worse about myself”

“I feel the movie had a little something for every woman out there to relate to with at least one or all the characters and their dramas”

“I am feeling really positive about all the possibilities before me and keep thinking of new ideas and directions for the future I have the occasional waver and worry”

And it keeps on and on. Some of these entries have been available for just a few minutes, others have been around for a few days. As I read through those posts, all I can think about is that there are tones of people out there who might be sharing the same feelings I have, and most importantly, what has caused them to write about those feelings, what happened to make them feel like that and express it. Basically, what’s their story?

I feel so good that I had the opportunity to work on this talk.

Well, as for the other TED presentations, two more are available in Portuguese. First one is the translation I did on this Esther Duflo’s talk about social experiments that help fight poverty around the world, and she focuses on fighting Malaria in developing countries. This talk was reviewed by Volney Faustini. And finally, I was a reviewer for this really interesting talk by Torsten Reil about his work to design a more life-like animation for games and movies, showing some experiments made and funny images! Translation by Caio Sanjuan.

P.S.: Jon Stewart, please, come back soon!