BlueDot Impact

Why I’m excited about this project

• Translations are a robust, low-risk, and relatively low-cost way to spread useful information to untapped audiences and regions.
• Open Phil  previously funded several translation grants but moved away from funding part-time and/or individual translators to fund more easily scalable, larger efforts (more here). Luan was one of the translators who didn’t get such funding.
• I haven’t read Luan’s translations, but he seems generally high-context, smart, and knowledgeable in English. Since he already did similar translation work before, I trust his ability to deliver well in this project.
• Since Luan reached out to me, it was almost zero cost for me to find this well-positioned translator. And, different from OP, I only have a small regranting pot anyway.
• Luan’s translations seem unusually useful since they already have a pretty well-defined target audience: newly-founded AI safety study groups in top Brazilian universities.

Challenges and concerns

- Maybe it’d be more cost-effective to fund a translator for Spanish or some other more popular language than Portuguese. I’d be keen to hear from folks doing that kind of work and for Manifund to support them, especially if OP isn’t. - But I expect the most popular languages to be correlated with OP support. I think I’d have expected even Portuguese to receive that kind of support, but maybe the lack of a large, professional translation service for EA work in Portuguese is the bottleneck here. - I’m not sure translating the AGISF curriculum is the best option, considering I’d expect most of the target audience for that to read English relatively well and because I think there’s some nontrivial chance the curriculum will be updated relatively often (caveat: I haven’t checked this with Bluedot). - But I updated after seeing the information Luan collected on people finding reading in Portuguese better for leaning, and I can’t think of an alternative resource that is as good for an introductory-level audience.