A big thank you to my colleague Colin Gallacher for bringing this to my attention...

There are few things on the Web more educational and/or more thought provoking than TED Talks. TED, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, brings together some of the world’s brightest people, which in turn has produced hundreds of amazing lectures and presentations, most of which are available free via http://ted.com/.

However, they’re not accessible to all; every talk is in English, which excludes billions of people that don't speak English.

TED’s goal is simple: for every video to have a fully translated text version in as many languages as possible.

Visit http://www.ted.com/translate to find out more and/or to view a clip in the language of your choice.

By the way, when all the translations are completed, every video will have subtitles, language-specific destinations (thus you can share a specific translation), and the ability to browse by talks.

By far the coolest thing about this push are the time-coded transcripts, which makes it possible for a non-English speaker to jump to any point of the video with ease. Every sentence in every transcript can be clicked. Clicking on it will take you to the corresponding section of the talk. It’s amazingly useful and could even be helpful for brushing up on a language as well.