Great News From GDELT Project: “A Transformative New Chapter: Translating The Entire Quarter-Century TV News Archive Through Gemini For Just $54K + All Channels Now Translated”

From a GDELT Project Post:

Today we are announcing a transformative new chapter in planetary-scale translation and towards our vision of making it possible to see the world through others’ eyes. In collaboration with the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, we have completed the Gemini-powered machine translation of the Archive’s entire quarter-century archive of more than 2.4 million non-English broadcasts and we are now translating all non-English broadcasts from all monitored channels each day. For the first time since its creation a quarter-century ago, you can now view machine translated English captioning for any broadcast from any country in any language across the entire TV News Archive!

In total, we translated more than 2.4M broadcasts we previously transcribed into their original languages using GCP’s Chirp ASR, totaling 4.5B seconds (75M min / 1.2M hours) of airtime spanning more than 6.8 billion words across 38 billion characters (46GB of text). Using Google Translate this would have cost more than $760K, but using Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking, this cost just $53,866 (consuming 79 billion input + output tokens). Only the public enterprise Vertex AI Gemini API was used and no data was used to train or tune any model.

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Moreover, the ability to translate 1.2 million hours of speech in over 150 languages and dialects for just under $54,000 brings the cost of at-scale translation down to the level where libraries and archives can now begin to tractably contemplate translating their holdings at scale into the languages of their patrons, making voices from the rest of the world vastly more accessible to journalists and scholars.

Learn More, Direct to Complete Post

Direct to GDELT TV News Visual Explorer (via GDELT)

Direct to GDELT Summary Research Tool

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users