About us

The COVID Translate Project is led by many volunteers from around the world to translate the documents published by Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (@KoreaCDC) to English and various other languages, with the mission of spreading the knowledge worldwide to fight COVID-19.

Our story

Late in the evening on Friday, March 27th, Professor Sebastian Seung tweeted a call for volunteers to crowdsource a translation of a KCDC COVID-19 protocol for local governments and public health officials:

1/ SAVE LIVES by translating Korean→English! 75 page playbook for @KoreaCDC’s fight against #Covid19. Let’s translate into English by Monday morning. No time to lose! Please share the link.

Within hours, a global team of people had jumped in. Over 50 people in the Google Doc editing together often caused the page to freeze, as we translated at speed from a (very rough) draft seeded from machine translation.

We created teams for every major task and got to know each other as we worked furiously day and night. Two days later, we had a complete and technically accurate—if not perfectly polished—document, and we released it as "v0.9" so that we could get the information out to people as quickly as possible (click here for more about the crowdsourcing process).

Over the next week, we worked on translating the appendices to that document and proofreading thoroughly, and we released final versions of those two documents on April 6 as "v1.0". The document is comprehensive, detailed, and practical and covers everything from quarantine protocols to how to deal with the deceased.

While every country's situation is unique, our hope is that by translating some of Korea's protocols into English, we can put that information in front of more eyes and increase our collective global know-how about how to fight this disease. And others seem to agree: we now have international teams translating the protocol from English into other languages!

Contact

For general inquiries, please contact us at covidtranslate@gmail.com. For more information on translating into other languages, please contact covidtranslate.international@gmail.com.