EA - Open Phil is seeking bilingual people to help translate EA/EA-adjacent web content into non-English languages by Eli Rose

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Open Phil is seeking bilingual people to help translate EA/EA-adjacent web content into non-English languages, published by Eli Rose on August 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary I work on Open Phil’s longtermist Effective Altruism Community Growth team. Our broad goal is to grow and support the pool of people who are well-positioned to work on longtermist priority projects. One thing we’re interested in is making it the case that more people are exposed to high-quality content — books, blog posts, papers, podcasts, videos, articles, etc. — on relevant topics, like effective altruism, longtermism, existential risk, rationality, etc. (This includes object-level content on cause areas like AI alignment and governance, biosecurity, global priorities, animal welfare, global health, etc.) But there’s a lot of high-quality content of this sort that’s currently only available in English or a few other world languages. This significantly limits how many people the content can reach. For this reason, Open Phil is interested in funding work that leads to EA/EA-adjacent content getting translated from English into other languages. We’re looking for people who are able to work full- or part-time (at least 5 hours a week), either a) translating content themselves, or b) hiring non-EA professional translators and reviewing their work for quality. Apply here if you’re interested in paid opportunities, part- or full-time, to help get content translated. FAQ Why is Open Phil excited about translation work? Translation work looks to me like an unusually concrete task aimed directly at a serious bottleneck in community-building. It can also be done remotely and on one’s own schedule, unlike other types of community-building work (e.g. running meetup groups). One simple way of thinking about the impact of translation work is by thinking about yourself as a miniature copy of the author. For example, the post On Caring took a certain number of hours for its author (Nate Soares) to write and has accrued a certain number of readers over time, which led to a certain amount of impact (which I think was positive). Currently, I’m not aware of any translation of this post into French. If you were to cause it to be translated into French, it would start accruing readers (probably fewer than it did in English), and after a while it’d have had some amount of impact, which would be some fraction of the impact Nate had in the original writing. In this scenario, you effectively spent some of your time acting as a mini-Nate. The “miniature version of the author” framing might make translation work sound like an unbelievably good use of time. Some important things this framing doesn’t highlight: The resulting translated work still needs to somehow get distributed to readers (which won’t happen automatically). The impact of a translation may be higher or lower than its raw number of readers would suggest. On the “lower” side: it is unfortunately, currently more difficult for people who don’t speak English to get involved in the EA community, for a variety of reasons (location of jobs, location of events, etc.). So readers of translated work may struggle to turn their interest into impact. On the “higher” side: There’s a lot less EA-related content in non-English languages. This means that someone who reads your translated work might have been less likely to encounter similar ideas elsewhere, which gives you more counterfactual “credit” for whatever impact they go on to have. But overall, I like how this framing highlights some core parts of why translation work is highly valuable per unit time, according to me: Translation is easier than original creation, so you can piggyback off the best authors’ work without yourself needing to be among EA’s best writers. You have the benefit of hindsigh...