Does Your Org Need Subtitles/Captions?

By Dean Jansen | Published: January 4, 2011

We’ve seen some amazing successes with volunteer contributed captions and translations recently —see OK Go and PBS NewsHour Translation Parties— but we know that some organizations might prefer to pay for captions. For example, this could allow them to publish a video with English captions from the get go, and then request volunteer help for translation into other languages.

If paid transcription (or translation) is something you or your organization may be interested in, for videos you’ve created, we’d love to chat: universalsubtitles@pculture.org

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Translation Party: PBS NewsHour

By Dean Jansen | Published: December 23, 2010

PBS NewsHour - Translation Party

What’s A Translation Party? This is an open translation project, where we’ve teamed up with PBS’ NewsHour and are asking fans to help translate the interview above into many different languages. If you speak more than one language, read on to find out how to get involved. If you speak English only, that’s totally fine too, because we need a TON of people to tweet, like, share, blog, and embed this video anywhere you can think of.

NewsHour has embedded the video, with subtitles, on their blog: http://to.pbs.org/g7Crvq

Multilingual folks: Click the tab under the video, look to see if there are subtitles, and then click “Add New Translation”. Select a language you’re fluent in. If you get a locked message, someone else is working on it — if you wait a bit, the person should finish up and you can check out their work. Correct errors you see by clicking “Improve These Subtitles” in the subtitle tab.

How to embed: Use the code at the bottom of this page.

Want to be Next? If you are a popular video creator and would like to do a translation party with us, please email (universalsubtitles@pculture.org). Organizations that are interested in managed subtitling solutions, should also be in touch— we have a new service launching soon.

To hear about the next Translation Party, follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or get email updates (sign up here, below the video).

Embed Code

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.www.universalsubtitles.org/embed.js">
({
"base_state": {},
"video_url": "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBAvG6PZp5Y",
video_config: {
width: 480,
height: 303
}
})
</script>

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Fantastic Internship Opportunity at PCF: Marketing & Outreach

By Dean Jansen | Published: December 21, 2010

PCF in a nutshell The Participatory Culture Foundation is a unique tech non-profit working to build a more open, collaborative world.

We’re responsible for Universal Subtitles, a project that makes Wikipedia-style collaboration for video subtitles and translations possible on a massive scale. Here’s a recent collaboration we launched with the band OK Go (the treadmill dudes): OK Go Translation Party Fans completed more than 90 translations in less than a day!

We also make Miro, an open source video and music player that’s used by millions of people who prefer having more control over their media. Miro doesn’t prop up a top-down, tightly controlled app ecosystem, unlike Apple’s iTunes.

The Internship This internship will be focused around marketing, outreach, social media, and other public communication. We have three major open source software products, millions of users, and are laying groundwork for a very large video translation and subtitling community. There’s a lot of communication happening, so we’ll keep you on your toes.

The exact nature of the position depends on your skill-set, but could include: developing and executing an outreach plan for independent video producers, blogging, expanding our social media presence, and so on. You will work most closely with the Business Development Director.

While PCF is a non-profit organization, the experience you gain will be applicable at almost any tech company, startup, media company, or other communications based position.

You are A self-motivated, driven, enthusiastic person with great communication skills. Ideally, at least a few of the following apply: writes a blog or tumblog, loves the internet for all its untapped potential, is surrounded by friends and followers on twitter/facebook/etc, works well independently. If you want to fetch coffee and need a boss, then this position isn’t for you.

Compensation We are a 501c3 non-profit and this internship is unpaid. We do offer course credit (where available), as well as experience working with a small but highly effective tech non-profit.

Commitment & Expectations We’re looking for a commitment of 8-12 hours per week. We have workspace available in our shared office in SoHo, New York City. This position is open to applicants worldwide; however, we may give preference to those located in New York City.

Applying Please send your cover letter, resume (optional), links to web presence (blogs/twitter/website/whatever), along in a hand crafted email to jobs(a)pculture.org Add “<internship>” somewhere in the subject, so we can automatically sort it.

Know of someone who might like this position? Please share this post with them and/or tweet about it to your friends!

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Join the OK Go Translation Party!

By Dean Jansen | Published: December 15, 2010

We just launched our first Translation Party, with OK Go (they did the amazing treadmill music video). Find out more: Join the party!

OK Go Translation Party

Join the Party!

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Universal Subtitles success story: 30 videos in 30 days

By Dean Jansen | Published: December 9, 2010

Our friend Matt Thompson, from Mozilla Drumbeat, posted a great article about Mirabai Knight (aka stenoknight) captioning 30 videos in 30 days. Matt read about the story in our most recent email newsletter, check the sidebar for details on signing up to the list —>

Article by Matt Thompson, of o p e n m a t t:

To help launch last month’s beta version of “the world’s simplest subtitling tool,” Mozilla Drumbeat and Universal Subtitles asked for your help. The challenge: kick the tires on the new tool by using it to subtitle 10,000 videos by the end of the year. We’re now over 40% of the way toward that goal, with 4,179 videos submitted as of today. The early verdict: the tool works, really is ridiculously simple to use, and is already being adopted by high-profile partners like Wikimedia Commons and MIT. Even more impressive, it has a growing community of inspiring users behind it — including some prolific pros like Stenoknight.

From DNA to Dr. Seuss: 30 videos in 30 days

Stenoknight, aka Mirabai Knight, provides real time captioning services for the deaf and hard of hearing. She took up the Universal Subtitles challenge by captioning 30 videos over 30 days — from a 3D animation about DNA and how ribosomes make proteins, to BBC nature documentaries, to Dr. Seuss, to a music video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” interpreted into American Sign Language. Check out her awesome recap post here.

“Thanks again to Universal Subtitles for their amazing captioning tool, and if anyone else would like to attempt to caption 30 videos in 30 days, go for it! I’d love to see this idea catch on.” –Stenoknight

Ramping up the pace: can you help?

The next goal for Universal Subtitles: ramp up the pace of development toward a full “1.0″ release early in 2011. Right now the project has two developers working half-time on the project. The Universal Subtitles team is trying to raise $25,000 by the end of the year, which will allow those developers to work full time and push to get the tool from beta to 1.0. Mozilla is matching all donations until the end of the year, so please send Universal Subtitles some love this holiday season. You can help now by:


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Dive in: Subtitle a video before 2011

By Dean Jansen | Published: December 6, 2010

If you’re excited about the potential of open subtitles and translations on the web, then it’s time to get your hands dirty! All you have to do is find a video you’re passionate about and subtitle it (we now support Vimeo, so that’s no excuse for not getting involved).

subtitle a video

If you’ve never created subtitles before, start with a short video (3 minutes or less). The process is quicker than you might imagine and is actually kind of fun. If you’re bilingual, you can translate something that has already been captioned or go directly into your native language. If you’re a pro, like stenoknight, maybe you want to try something a little longer form ;)

Spread the word. Do yours before 2011

Once you’ve completed a video, please tweet about it with #usinguniversalsubs

We’ll be joining you, and tweeting as we go!

Get started now!

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Help MIT subtitle OpenCourseWare videos

By Dean Jansen | Published: November 22, 2010

MIT OpenCourseWare is inviting volunteers to help caption and subtitle the full library of videos for a chemistry course titled, “Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering”.

Screenshot of lecture video with universal subtitles enabled Each lecture in the series is roughly an hour and twenty-five minutes long, so completing these is definitely a challenge. Eventually we’ll make it easier to break this type of job into smaller pieces, but in the mean time we’d love to have people jump in and tell us what works well and what can be improved.

There are partial English captions already done for the beginning of each lecture. If you find that someone else is already working on improvements for one lecture, just go down the list and try the next one. If you’re serious about contributing, I would suggest checking out the OCW subtitles group on facebook.

So by all means, please join in: Get started subtitling OCW videos (and let us know what you think)

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Number of videos subtitles doubled in 3 weeks

By Dean Jansen | Published: November 9, 2010

Soon we’ll make a whole bunch of statistics available, but we wanted to start with a single number on our homepage that answers the question: “How many videos have been submitted to the Universal Subtitles site for captioning and translation?”

2071 videos use Universal Subtitles

The counter on universalsubtitles.org

Today, the answer is a hair more than 2,000 videos. Whenever someone goes through the process of adding a video, we’ll tick the counter up by one.

Adding videos and donations!

In less than three weeks, we’ve gone from 1,000 to 2,000 videos. Our goal is to double it again in another three weeks, which keeps us on track to reach our larger goals of reaching 10,000 videos added AND raising $25,000 in donations by the end of 2010. Mozilla Drumbeat is helping spearhead the initiative and is matching all donations, dollar for dollar.

Please help us spread the word!

Subtitle your video now

Donate Now (will be matched by Mozilla)

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Enable subtitles on your video (the fast way)

By Dean Jansen | Published: November 2, 2010

You can enable Universal Subtitles on your video in less than one minute, here’s how:

The "Subtitle Me" tab

The "Subtitle Me" tab on a YouTube video

Step 1: Take an existing video

Copy the URL for an existing video that you have on the web.

Compatible formats & services include .mp4, .ogv, .webm, .flv, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Dailymotion, and we’re always adding more.

Step 2: Add to Universal Subtitles

subtitle-a-vid

Paste your URL into the subtitle a video page.

Note You can skip this step by pasting your video URL directly into the embed code below.

Step 3: Get embed code

Embed code box

You will land on the video’s subtitles homepage. This page has embed code that can be easily copied and pasted. The page also gives you access to a list of languages and how complete they are, subtitle import and export, a full record of all changes ever made to any of the subtitles, and more. Here’s an example of a video’s subtitle homepage.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.www.universalsubtitles.org/embed.js">
(
{"base_state": {}, "video_url": "http://yourURL.com/specific-video"}
)
</script>

Step 4: Embed it & you’re done

Now you just embed the video and viewers will be able to use, add, and improve subtitles.

We’re starting to strongly encourage organizations and individuals to begin adding subtitling capabilities to their videos. Please let us know about any experiments you do (in the comments or via email).

Want to add “Subtitle Me” tabs to every video on your site?

In the coming weeks, we’ll release a script that you can add to your website’s <header> template and will enable Universal Subtitles for every video on your site. We’ll be blogging about that here.

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Please help translate our how-to videos

By Dean Jansen | Published: October 27, 2010

the how-to video on the subtitle interface

The how-to video on the subtitle interface.

We’ve had a few requests to add captions and subtitles to the “How to use Universal Subtitles” videos that pop up when you begin using our subtitle creation interface. While the request comes as no surprise, we have this funny issue where we can’t easily embed the subtitling widget/interface into videos that are already inside the subtitling widget/interface.

So our solution (for the time being) is to make subtitle homepages for the videos (for example, the help video for the first step), where they can easily be subtitled. In the next version of the widget interface, we’ll add a link/note about the subtitles being available for the how-to video.

Long story short is that we could really use your help translating our captions into different languages. I’ve embedded the three videos below!



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