Miro Subs Alpha a project of the participatory culture foundation

Great news, everybody! Khan Academy, the wildly successful project of Salman Khan, has fully integrated Universal Subtitles into over 2,100 videos on their website. You can read more about the news at GigaOm.

A non-profit educational organization, Khan Academy was founded in 2006 with a mission to “provide a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.” The educational videos cover a variety of subjects and ability levels, like mathematics, physics, finance, economics, and more.

Click subtitles button to reveal Universal Subtitles

Khan Academy is easily accessible to students, parents, and teachers. While students can make use of the extensive video library and practice problems, the parents and teachers can mark the progress and witness the students gain the knowledge they need in order to succeed. The response received by Khan Academy users is overwhelmingly positive; in fact, Bill Gates, who uses the program with his kids, claims, “This guy [Sal Khan] is amazing. It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.”

By adding Universal Subtitles to the website, more people can now get involved in creating the educational videos. Viewers who translate the lessons into different languages make the content a lot more accessible and comprehensible to followers around the world.

Check out the Khan Academy website at www.khanacademy.org and support the cause by translating!

Our friends at Streetfilms have just launched Universal Subtitles to engage their viewers.

Take a look at this video about Highway Removal, which has already been translated in 9-10 languages:

Streetfilms is a resource for people who want to improve the street life of their cities. They produce videos that show how smart transportation design and policy can result in better places to live, which have inspired worldwide action and behavioral change. Since these issues impact people speaking a variety of languages, they’re a great example of using Universal Subtitles to expand your reach.

Here’s an interesting video about Parking Reform, where Universal Subtitles is enabled: will you be the first one to translate it in your language?

On the LA Streets Blog, David Barboza has translated a whole video into Spanish, and will be receiving a StreetsBlog t-shirt in return. Streetfilms is giving out prizes to people who translate videos – you could be next!

Streetfilms has enabled Universal Subtitles on every video – in order to translate, click the title of the video as soon as it starts playing or click on “read full post”. Once you are on the video page, you can find the Universal Subtitles widget at the bottom left corner of every video.

Below is President Obama’s address on the death of Osama bin Laden. We’ve added English captions and are encouraging people to translate the speech.

Tweet

Universal Subtitles is looking for an experienced Django/JavaScript developer. This is an ideal gig for someone who wants to build free and open source software to create social change. You’ll be building features to help an active and growing community do world changing work.

We’re looking for a web developer who is either (or both):

1. an experienced Django developer or…
2. capable of building interactive web applications in Javascript.

All your work will be free , open source software, available under the AGPL license.  Our supporters include Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation, and our tool was recently used by the New York Times in their Egypt coverage.

Things that make you an even stronger candidate, from our point of
view:

• Thorough knowledge of Django
• Confidence tackling the occasional systems issue: SOLR, memcached, S3
• Ability to make reasonable UI/UX decisions on the fly as you code
• Good communication skills for working with developers in other organizations (partners, clients)
• Project management experience

To apply, send a resume (txt or rtf) to jobs at pculture dot org.  If you’d like to learn a bit about how we work, check out our github page or our issue tracker.

PCF/Universal Subtitles has been accepted as a mentor for the Google Summer of Code program, which gives developers a summer-long stipend to participate in free and open source software projects. As part of the process, we’ve put up a list of possible Summer of Code ideas.  Have a look and tell us what you think. Lots of ideas are things that will be coming soon in Universal Subtitles no matter what. A few are simply awesome things we think the right person could really sink their teeth into and enjoy working on.

Our biggest hope is finding some amazing people to work both this summer and beyond. So even if you’re not a developer, you can help us by spreading the word, so we can get as many great developers as possible to apply. Applications open March 28th and the deadline is April 8th (see the timeline).

Read on for the Summer of Code ideas…
Continue reading →

As the courageous protests continue, we’re been able to help the folks at Alive in Egypt make their AIE video page fully translatable. Their site has been attracting many volunteers who are translating voice-to-twitter calls from Egyptians. They have also been aggregating videos from on the ground, but up till now they didn’t have an easy way for people to translate and subtitle those.

Start Translating Alive in Egypt Videos Now >>

From Alive in Egypt’s About page:

Alive in Egypt was started to add further functionality to the Twitter, Google and SayNow Egypt collaboration. We were so impressed and excited with the technology and the number of calls coming in that we wanted to help bring the voice of the Egyptians to even more people. We reached out to our network of translators and started working on a public spreadsheet to help translate all the audio files coming out.

We’re so honored to contribute in some small way to the change in how people perceive major world events in the internet age. Right now, anyone who speaks two relevant languages (Arabic and any other major language, in this case) can help bridge the gap for non-speakers, for nearly any video on the internet. The actual effects of this ongoing major shift in media coverage won’t be understood until we’re well clear of the present, but right this second it’s feeling pretty radical.

If you understand and write Arabic, I urge you to join the translation effort! For those that don’t, please watch some of these videos (and help promote diversity in news diets everywhere).

We are launching a special project with PBS NewsHour today to translate last night’s State of the Union address into as many languages as we can! Check it out and jump in >>

Belgium is a country with three official languages and a lot of political tension. The video embedded below features Kris Janssens, a Belgian radio personality who is fed up with some of the politicians in his country, generated a lot of traffic on the Universal Subtitles website. In the video Janssens is venting about the Flemmish speaking majority failing to make decisions and take action (he speaks Flemmish himself on the radio, as well as in this video). We’re not experts on the situation, but here’s a story illustrates the political climate (via nytimes).

At least two major French language (Belgian) publications linked to this video and we estimate that the video had roughly 90,000 views on Universal Subtitles site, out of the 215,000 total views reported on YouTube. For a country of 10 million people, that’s a pretty significant number of views. In fact, 70% of our visitors this month were from Belgian IP addresses (this isn’t counting views on embedded subtitle views across all Universal Subtitles videos, which is significantly more global).

The video itself reached across the political spectrum and seemed to be very well received by many of the French speaking viewers who sent us feedback. While it could have been downloaded, subtitled by a single person or small group, and re-uploaded to a new YouTube account for a single new language, there’s no guarantee that would have happened. It seems even less likely that a subtitled version would have ever appeared on a mainstream news program.

Instead, Universal Subtitles made the process of subtitling incredibly easy and very timely, allowing for maximum impact with very little effort from any single person or organization. It’s not clear if the person who originally put the video on Universal Subtitles was affiliated with the news organizations, Janssens, or working independently. However, at this point the origin of the initial subtitles seems moot; not only is the video available in French and German (the two additional official Belgian languages), but it’s also currently subtitled in English, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Norwegian. Interested non-Flemmish speakers from all over Europe and the rest of the world can be more in-tune with what’s happening in Belgium’s heated political scene.

This story underlines the importance of subtitles in a multilingual society and world, and illustrates how an open and participatory process can foster clear communication across political, linguistic, and geographic barriers. We hope this is just the first of many examples of Universal Subtitles making good on the promise of more fluid and democratic communication in online video.