Over at Doing good: the edgeryders’ community makes our video global Alberto described my creating subtitles for his video as an act of kindness, and mentioned something about commitment.
Nonsense.
Let me introduce you to the Dark Truth.
I was merely scratching an itch …
That’s an expression used in the Free (as in Libre) Software world. You do something to solve your own problem, and if that helps others, well, you may feel a bit better, but oh, what a bliss when that itch is gone!
My itch was that I wanted to understand what this EdgeRyders’ thing was about. Not a pass-me-by understanding, but a deeper one. And translating and blogging about whatever you’re interested in, well, it does the trick for me.
I also had another itch. I wanted to show one of my favourite tools to others. You know, just like chimps show off by shaking trees that make interesting sounds. I don’t know exactly how it works, but it’s definitely an itch. Interesting stuff hurts if not shared. (Why Nature wanted to do that to us is probably an interesting question in itself. But I disgress.)
Finally, I’m always curious about how lazily I can do something.
What I did …
1) First, I went to PiratePad.net, created a page with a link to Alberto’s video, and added a sentence about needing help to do the transcription. My idea was I’d tell people through twitter, see if people would come over, and start transcribing together.
You know how: you land on the piratepad page, look for some untranscribed chunk, and type. If you’re tired, even if only a little bit, you can look at what others are typing in real time, and correct their typos right behind them.
How do I describe it? It’s a constructive mess! I did it once, and it was really exhilarating. In 40 minutes we transcribed 4 minutes of video, but we were simultaneously doing other things, it was mostly two people, and I wanted to test if we could do better …
This time … I waited for a full 5 minutes, and no-one came.
2) While I waited, I transcribed a few sentences. “Strong Italian accent, similar in a way to Spanish, sounds doable.” But stressful if done on your own, because you get no feedback, it’s all very much a straight line like a boring motorway, boring, boring …
Then I saw the red “CC” at the bottom of the youtube video. For some unkown reason, some videos have that button, while most don’t. It gives you automatic transcription, a fine feature which would be much cooler if you could download the transcription, but you can’t. Anyway, maybe … yes, I could type what came up on the screen, and save myself a bunch of time. Again this question: how easy can it get?
I found I could do one pass, and then another, and in 15 minutes I had transcribed most of the text.
3) Now, transcribing “most of the text” is not a good thing. You can’t use that, and yet you know the last 5% can take for ever, so you need a way out.
I took the unfinished text to Alberto and friends, and kindly asked for help, putting on my best Shrek’s Cat face, and hoping someone might be tempted to fill in the gaps.
Alberto himself did, and I’m grateful for that.
4) Now, I had created a problem for myself. I had this transcription, and I knew turning it into subtitles was not far away. Who do I hand this to? No-one in sight but myself. “Oh, fractal cheese!”, I muttered. “Ok, ok, I’ll take just one more step.”
(I had to. “Had to”, means the next step is so easy as to be compelling, right? There’s a lesson there, I’m sure. “Build systems that make it easy to contribute”, or something of that sort.)
So I went to Universal Subtitles, where I did have an account already, added the link to Alberto’s video, moved the text to the proper place, spent about 10 minutes synchronising it without aiming for perfection, because perfction is incompatible with life, and watched it once more, full of pride.
I knew the hard part was over.
5) After subtitles are synchronised - i.e., the written words match the spoken words - translating doesn’t take much time. Maybe 15 minutes, plus one more minute to look up some hard words using google “hard-word english spanish”.
Now I had a link to share! http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/14PHRm1OCieV/
Now, step 6) is for other people. Whoever wants, in whatever language, can do their own 15 minutes, or even a smaller part of that if they want to stop at whatever point in the process.
So far, not counting English (which Alberto finished) and Spanish (which I did), 3.25 new translations have been created by people I don’t know. Yes, that’s 5.25 languages done.
If what I put in was, all in all, around 45 minutes, that means my contribution has been matched by 3.25 x 15 minutes = almost 49 minutes from other people. It’s no longer my thing! Yippie!
Soon, if more languages are done, people will have donated 100 or 200 minutes, effectively dwarfing my initial contribution. A real Stone Soup story!
Which brings us to …
Some thoughts and questions
I scrached my itch: learned about EdgeRyders, blogged in my own language, and learned how the red “CC” button really speeds things up (though it could be better).
We may or may not see 5 or 10 or 20 translations, and I really don’t care that much. The game, for me, is over. It’s Harvest Time!
What we have is yet another instance of the “voluntary cooperation” model: one minute at a time, and one line at a time. Learning (or telling) something as we go. Always doing exactly what’s easy for us, and what we feel like doing.
Could we do more things like this? What’s wrong with this model? What are the limitations? What would you add to the model? Is it simpler than it looks?
