Daban Q. Jaff, a Lecturer at the Department of English, Faculty of Education, Koya University introduces translating TED Talks to his class in two successive years. As part of class requirement, and as an attempt to promote the Kurdish language online presence, Daban Q. jaff introduces translating TED Talks to his class. TED platform is an international non-profit organization that each year gathers entrepreneurs and creative people around the world in two conferences at Vancouver in Canada and San Francisco in USA, in addition to that TED licenses independently and locally organized conferences that aim at spreading ideas worth to be shared.

I hope you are still keeping well under these difficult and extraordinary circumstances. I love TED, I found meaning and belonging in translating TED talks. I dedicate so much time to add as many Kurdish subtitles as possible, I have been working on recruiting more translators. However, the current layout of Kurdish language on Amara platform is not helping us, I hope they will fix these issues. Concerning your admiration for our latest bulk of tasks, I have to say, It made me and my students day. We are very grateful for this, and I want you to know that this does not only boost our spirit and enthusiasm, but it will motivate so many more translators to join us in translating subtitles, Daban says.
Moreover, the chunks translated into Kurdish language on TED platform can potentially be subject to many academic scholarships, rencentily a joint collaboration between Koya University staff and Aso engineering staff decided to work on creating a parallel corpus for the Kurdish and English languages on the translated data on TED platform, a corpus that could consist of one million tokens. The work is under process and soon will be introduced. Further details will be published about this project in future.

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Koya University (KOU) is located in the city of Koya (Koy Sanjaq) which is 1.0 hr drive to the East of the Kurdistan Region capital Erbil (Arbil, Hewlér) in Kurdistan Region of F.R. Iraq. It is on the foothills of beautiful high mountain. Its campus has been carefully laid out to embrace the beautiful mountainous nature. . There are 4 Faculties and 2 Schools in KOU; Faculty of Engineering (FENG), Faculty of Science and Health (FSCH), Faculty of Education (FEDU), Faculty of Humanities and Social Silences (FHSS), Shcool of Physical Education (SPHE) and School of Medicine (SMED). Also, there are two research centers; Genome Center and Malai Gawra Center. Moreover, at KOU there is an English Language Center (BELC) at KOU has been opened with the sponsorship of IREX and American embassy in Baghdad as well as with the support of Spring International Language Center of The University of Arkansas. KOU has two Scientific Journals; ARO-The Scientific Journal of Koya University, which is indexed by Clarivate Analytics (ESCI), and Koya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (KUJHSS). KOU is a proactive member of Erasmus/ Marhaba Project and Erasmus+. KOU signed many Memorandum of Understandings (MoU) with many International Universities, e.g., The University of Arkansas (June 2015). The Lulea University in Sweden (April 2014), The University of Nottingham in the UK, The University of Buckingham in the UK (Oct 2008), Belkin University in Turkey (Sep 2009) and The University of Greenwich in the UK.