Dutch TED Translator Community

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This is a short introduction to the Dutch OTP community. The data reflect the situation in October 2011.

Where do the Dutch TED Translators live?

You may be surprised to see that quite a few Dutch TED Translators live abroad. Dutch TED Translations are active from Canada to Belize, from India to Sweden. Suriname, the third partner in the Dutch Language Union that unites the Netherlands and Flanders, is very poorly represented, with only one translation. The very first Dutch TED Translator was a resident of Switzerland.

As expected, however, most Dutch TED Translators live in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) or in the Netherlands. They are rather evenly spread across both countries.

Map 1, Residence of TED Translations, World wide
Map 2, Residence of TED Translations, Belgium and Netherlands

The ranking of the cities with the most Dutch TED Translators is as follows:

  1. Amsterdam, Netherlands, 14
  2. Utrecht, Netherlands, 11
  3. Rotterdam, Netherlands, 8
  4. Leuven, Belgium, 7
  5. Nijmegen, Netherlands, 7
  6. Antwerpen, Belgium, 7
  7. Groningen, Netherlands, 7
  8. Den Haag, Netherlands, 6
  9. Amersfoort, Netherlands, 5
  10. Mechelen, Belgium, 4
  11. Gent, Belgium, 4
  12. Haarlem, Netherlands, 4
  13. Eindhoven, Netherlands, 4

Netherlands-Belgium: who is leading?

In Belgium and in the Netherlands, we're always in for a good game of "Netherlands-Belgium". Both regions seem to have their strengths and weaknessess. In soccer, the track record of the Dutch is, let's put it mildly, the most convincing. In the annual spelling contest, the "Grand Dictation of the Dutch Language", the Flemish tend to do better than their colleagues from the Netherlands. But what about the efforts in the TED Open Translation Project?

NL BE OTP Balance shift.png
NL BE OTP Evolution.png


It turns out that the balance shifted over time. Until mid 2010, translators from the Netherlands were clearly leading the game. However, as of the second half of 2010, the Belgians took over. In 2011, it almost seemed as though a large part of the translation community from the Netherlands had given up. Luckily, since the second half of 2011, there seems to be a renewed interest from the Netherlands. It is still not in proportion with the number of speakers of Dutch per country, which is more than double that of Belgian Dutch speakers.

How did the Dutch OTP community evolve as a whole?

What better means do we have than a Rosling graph (aka a Google Motion Chart) to guide us through the evolution of the project?

The following data are available:

  • Total Translations, i.e. the cumulative number of translations published in a given language.
  • New Translations, i.e. the number of new translations published in a given language in a given week.
  • Total Translators, i.e. the cumulative number of translators who have been active in a given language at some point in time.
  • New Translators, i.e. the number of translators who published their first translation in a given language in a given week.
  • Active Translators, i.e. the number of translators who published a translation in a given language in a given week.
  • Speakers, i.e. the number of speakers of a given language.

You can choose your own combination. To get a flavor of the activity from week to week, while seeing the evolution over time, try this:

  • Use the Total Translations on the X-axis to see the growth of the corpus of translations;
  • Use the Total Translators on the Y-axis to see the growth of the community of translators;
  • Use Active Translators for the size of the bubble, to see the evolution in the number of active translators over time;
  • Set trails for Spanish, for Croation and - of course - for Dutch, to see three very different patterns.

Dutch Language Coordinators

The Dutch Language Coordinators are Els De Keyser, Axel Saffran and Christel Foncke.