The idea of Dotsub was born in early 2004 after viewing the film "Fahrenheit 911." Michael Smolens, Founder and CEO of Dotsub, realized that if one documentary film in English might have an impact on a very close US Presidential election, what would happen if all independent and documentary films, television programming and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages - what a powerful impact on the world that would be!
Dotsub is a browser-based tool that gives anyone the ability to caption and translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles seen across the bottom of videos.
A lovely article discussing translation at The New York Times. Finding linguistic common ground is a creative and human process.
#translation
To translate 50 news articles a week, NYT en Español looks for the common ground in a language spoken by 500 million people in many different ways.
Dotsub's Dave Bryant is at Media For All in Stockholm. He will be on the MESA panel at 10 on Tuesday. https://bit.ly/2Xj8Oqu
8th Media for All conference – Complex Understandings on June 17–19, 2019.
Dotsub's Dave Bryant is at Media For All in Stockholm! He will be on the MESA panel at 10 on Tuesday. https://bit.ly/2Xj8Oqu
8th Media for All conference – Complex Understandings on June 17–19, 2019.
"Lomas, who speaks some French and Mandarin, acknowledges that it can be tricky to isolate words from their cultural context. But he noted that a few of the entries in his lexicon, such as nirvāna (Sanskrit) and bon vivant (French), are already commonly used by English speakers. Perhaps some of the rest will eventually be adopted, too, filling the gaps in our vocabularies and helping us give names to newly felt emotions, or to those that are familiar but difficult to articulate."
An enjoyable read from The New Yorker on that ever-fascinating idea of 'untranslatable' words.
From May 2016.
Happy weekend, language fans!
#translation or #untranslatable
Could understanding other cultures’ concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own?
"...too many film-makers look on subtitling as an afterthought, an attitude the AVTE is seeking to correct. As Buchanan points out, “Subtitles are the conduit allowing you to communicate your film’s ideas around the globe. Bad subtitles can ruin millions of dollars’ worth of hard work. A film-maker wouldn’t outsource their colour correction or audio mix and just think: ‘I’ll leave them to it, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’ They would want to see it, hear it, get a second opinion, make sure everybody is on the same page. It should be the same with subtitles.”"
Well, quite.
#subtitles #filmmaking #roma #artoftranslation #translation
Clumsy and insensitive translations can ruin the enjoyment of a foreign-language film. Don’t blame us, say the subtitlers pressing film-makers for more appreciation of their art
"The rise of the high-bandwidth web brought with it an ocean of video content, especially user-generated content uploaded to social media.
For those with different hearing abilities, the overwhelming majority of this vast ocean is entirely inaccessible. Few users spend the time to go back retroactively and type up timecoded captioning for their video masterpieces."
Accessibility is important to us at Dotsub, which is why we work with qualified human transcribers, to create accurate timecoded captions in many languages for as much video as possible. The gap between hype and reality has meant many AI technologies don't quite live up to what they promise - yet. But we're hoping Facebook's technologies will continue to improve, to ensure more and more video is accessible to all.
#captions #hardofhearing #accessibility #facebook #AI #closedcaptions
The difference between Facebook and YouTube's automatic closed captioning of a recent NASA video reminds us that AI done right can be spectacular, but that much of the AI landscape is failed hype. Unfortunately, for those with differing hearing abilities, comedic captions are no laughing matter.
Happy Friday to everyone except the BBC subtitlers who took this incredible shortcut when subtitling the French president.
#subtitlefail #BBC #Macron
News about Brexit is seemingly breaking the entirety of Great Britain, none more so than the people trying to cover it. Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar was visiting Paris to meet French president Emmanuel Macron because of the Brexit situation the UK has blindly wandered in to. Their meeting was b...
We're thrilled to be exhibiting at #GALAMunich next week! Deutschland, hier kommen wir 🇩🇪😎🇩🇪
#l10n #i18n #subtitles
#oops #subtitlefail #subtitles
Did you watch the brilliant Roma by Alfonso Cuaron - and did you use subtitles? Where should the line be drawn when it comes to subtitling?
We're (obviously) advocates of subtitling to aid comprehension, be that for foreign languages, dialects or just a noisy background. However, being sensitive to when subtitles are actually needed is key.
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-46822379 #subtitles #roma #alfonsocuaron
Director Alfonso Cuarón is furious about his latest film being subtitled. Why is it such a minefield?
Wishing all our friends, followers and customers a great end to the year and a wonderful 2019. Cheers!!
"Translation is more than ever essential, and more than ever vulnerable, in a world deluged by meaningless media and globalization. Whether in politics, literature, film or the kitchen, it is more than ever necessary to ensure that the Greek narrative reaches into other worlds, and safely."
Some nice words about translation by author and critic Richard Pine.
How clever of the Romans to have pushed “translation” into pole position in our vocabulary, superseding the Greek “metaphrasi.” So much so that few today recognize “metaphor” as the equivalent of “translation,” the carrying across of meaning from one language, one mind-set, one cultu...
Latin Stars and K-pop going global: https://bbc.in/2EbnE9t
Latin music and K-pop are riding high in the UK charts - so why are Brits finally embracing songs in other languages?
Is Machine Translation the end of the human translator? Great overview of the state of the technology in a podcast. https://bbc.in/2PajDmr
Will new technology mean the end of the human translator?
A wonderful chat between writers working in translation, on the 'monoglot condition', mother tongues, and language learning and teaching.
BBC Arundhati Roy Meena Kandasamy Preti Taneja
Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.
“Translation is not, by its very nature, a high-profile craft. If you have spun your illusion successfully, then you are quite rightly invisible.”
Remembering Anthea Bell, translator of work as varied as the comic Asterix, to WG Sebald.
Her award-winning renderings of works by Freud, Kafka and WG Sebald in English were capped by her ties to the little Gaulish village we know so well
Meet Central Europe is coming to Budapest on October 30 & 31. Dave Bryant, Dotsub's COO, will be talking about the art of video localization. https://www.meetcentraleurope.com/
Meet Central Europe Conference 2018: Inspiring Vendor Managers - a CEE regional conference for LSPs and freelancer translators. Meet Central Europe has been founded by 4 independent translation industry associations from Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
The Scots language continues to flourish! https://bit.ly/2xWQi9r
Against all odds, 28 percent of Scottish people still use it.
Happy International Translation Day! (September 30)
An entertaining TEDx talk by Sid Efromovich on language learning. How many of these five tips have helped you? We're fans of having conversations in the shower!
Never miss a talk! SUBSCRIBE to the TEDx channel: http://bit.ly/1FAg8hB Sid is our resident hyperpolyglot. He grew up in Brazil and after some journeying aro...
Michael Smolens, Dotsub's Chairman and CEO, will be serving on the panel discussion at Brightcove's Video Breakfast Club NYC on Thursday September 20th 8:30am - !0:30am. https://bit.ly/2D6uE7B
Video Breakfast Club NYC - Thursday, September 20, 2018
From The New York Times:
"Lately, the perils of mistranslation have taken on renewed currency. How to convey Donald Trump’s free-form declarations to a global audience? The president’s capricious employ of his native idiom, his fractured syntax and streaming non sequiturs are challenging enough for Anglophones, so imagine the difficulties they pose to foreigners: How, exactly, do you translate “braggadocious”?"
How, indeed...
Would history have been different if Khrushchev had used a better interpreter?
Happy weekend, Dotsubbers!
#subtitles #translation #pianists
Rainy Sunday reminder.
Thanks Radio Times for this fascinating look into the complex world of live #subtitling!
Thomas Ling finds out how TV captions are made – and why Huw Edwards is a nightmare to subtitle...
#subtitles #readingcomprehension #justsaying
Ever more reasons to love subtitling!
Running subtitles in the same language as the dialogue in the television programme helps viewers match the spoken word to the written
#justsaying!
Fascinating article about accents from the NYT. https://nyti.ms/2L6cHcU
We need to set aside the illusion that there is a single true and authentic way to speak.
We're thrilled to announce our new partnership with Gather Voices, a platform for original user-generated video content that provides social proof through the voices of real people. A new way for brands and campaigns to hear from their followers, and help regular people be part of the conversation.
We'll be helping increase the reach of Gather Voices videos by providing multilingual subtitles!
Dotsub is proud to announce an exclusive partnership with Gather Voices, a technology company that makes it easy for companies and nonprofits to collect, manage and share user-generated video content. This partnership is evidenced by the integration of Dotsub into the GV-One product. Users of the GV...
News about a breath taking project: Counting the number of languages in India! https://bit.ly/2MZEEAm
There are at least 780.
An Alaskan school district receives the Seal of Bi-literacy in their native tongue. How do you effectively measure a student’s language skills when there are few equivalences? When to get food you don't drive to the grocery store - rather you go hunting. https://bit.ly/2tkaRcI
The Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) is roughly the size of West Virginia, with 22 schools spread across a remote area of Alaska’s Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. There are no roads, and the most common ways to travel between towns are to fly or snowmobile. It is also a region where th...
What do stones have to do with language...maybe? https://theatln.tc/2sKm9aC
It might have hijacked our early ancestors’ brains.
Do you slam the door shut on a conversation? A simple tip to engage: https://nyti.ms/2s4rwAo
"Translation is like rubbish collection: it only gets noticed when something goes wrong".
Mark Polizzotti's new book 'Sympathy for the Traitor' dives into the need for translation, and the thin line literary translators must tread. Thanks Financial Times for this review - one for Dotsub's summer reading list!
‘Sympathy for the Traitor’ is a spirited defence of the creative role of literary translators
"Translation is like rubbish collection: it only gets noticed when something goes wrong".
Mark Polizzotti's new book 'Sympathy for the Traitor' dives into the need for translation, and the thin line literary translators must tread. Thanks Financial Times for this review - one for Dotsub's summer reading list!
‘Sympathy for the Traitor’ is a spirited defence of the creative role of literary translators
A great slice of Kenyan life from the Economist - movie 'DJs' who explain what's going on to local audiences.
We've been saying this for years: video content makes much more impact when it's in your own language. Now, which of my local movie theatres has one of these guys... 🤔
Since so many films are foreign, many audiences like a live narrator to guide them
Good news for people brought up in bilingual households or communities: apparently, kids under 10 are best at learning and retaining new languages.
When it comes to learning a new language, popular opinion holds that it is more difficult to achieve as an adult than a child. But is there really a “critical period” for language learning? While it has been hard to prove, new research published in the journal Cognition, suggests that there is i...
Lovely article from Katy Derbyshire on literary translation - the 'profession for optimists'. And perfectionists, too!
#translation
Editor and translator Katy Derbyshire poses the question to ten practitioners and stresses why we need to be talking about it.
South America is an incredibly linguistically diverse place, with some of the rarest languages in the world coming from the Amazon basin.
This map may not be the most accurate in terms of numbers or areas but does give *some* impression of the wealth of linguistic diversity in this continent. It's not just Spanish and Portuguese, you know!
We're lucky to have many Dotsub team members based in Argentina, and across the entire continent - saludos, equipo!
#Languages of South #America
Source: http://ow.ly/NXKT30jJzI8
More linguistic goodness from The Economist. What does 'difficult' mean, anyway?
Ranking languages on a universal scale of difficulty is itself difficult and controversial
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay in the translation world!
At Dotsub, we're very pleased to read greetings in Facebook comments. But for the work we do translating videos for the medical, financial services and educational sectors, we will stick with expert human translators for now...
What are your thoughts on this technology?
Artificial intelligence makes 4.5 billion translations happen each day on Facebook.
From our friends at the Economist. Would you agree that French is more of a global language than Arabic or Chinese?
Forget Chinese or Hindi. If you want to learn a language which is truly global, learn French. From The Economist’s 1843 magazine
Wishing our translator friends, colleagues and badass polygots a lovely sunny time at BP translation conference in Vienna, Austria.
Dotsub is proud to support and assist Cardiff City's goals for global development and increased fan engagement. Get it - goals?
Cardiff City Football Club partners with Dotsub to benefit local & global fanbase...
Find out more 👇
#CityAsOne 🔵⚽️🔵⚽️
From the Economist: "Hollywood is leading more films with non-white actors and women. Why not put the world’s languages in the spotlight too?" https://goo.gl/cseMLG
The use of Xhosa in “Black Panther” gave it a foreign flair. But directors can be bolder
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Learn how to use our new 'Facebook Publish' feature! http://blog.dotsub.com/2015/07/08/publishing-dotsub-videos-to-facebook/
Posting this video as my page! #CoolBeans #Dotsub
Captioned version of Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of the expansion of Internet.org. Original on https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/vb.4/10102067763746671/
