Translate Ben's unMonastery interview into different languages

Workspaces unMonastery
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21

Spanish is done too :slight_smile:

[LucasG] has been busy, I see. Thanks!

So, now weā€™ve got seven languages down: English, Estonian, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian and Spanish. And three more under way: French, Polish and Portuguese. So far I am the only one working on the French, which is about 60% complete, but the quality is what you might expect from me.

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Bug in Amara! Translators please read this

Hi all. It turns out that there is a bug in Amara: if you make changes to the original subtitles (English, in our case), this breaks the connection between them and any translation started before making the changes. Amara has wiki functionalities, so you can undo changes to the original subtitles by reverting to the previous revision; but this will not un-break the connection. Result: people working on translations donā€™t see anymore the English subtitles as they input the translations. The implications is that translators would work instead by playing a little bit of the video, then write the translation down, then move on to the next etcetera. Unfortunately, I did make such changes to get rid of two ugly-looking empty subtitle lines. Sorry!Ā The bug was noticed one year ago and acknowledged by Amara, but never solved.

Good news: completed translations are not affected ā€“ subtitles display as normal. At the time of writing we have complete translations in English, Estonian, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian and Spanish. Also, new translations are not affected: you can follow Noemiā€™s instructions at the beginning of this thread and they will work as normal.

Who isĀ affected is people working on the four in-progress translations: French (me), German (Lorenzo, who has no Edgeryders account), Polish ([Justyna Krol]) andĀ Portuguese ([pacheca]). Hereā€™s how you can solve this:

  1. if you prefer to translate by listening to Ben speaking (some people do), there is no change. Amara's interface lets you do that.
  2. if you prefer to translate by looking at the English subtitles, start by creating a new translation in some language that you don't think will be used or some regional variant of the main language ā€“ I used French Canadian for French.Ā 
  3. translate as normal. If you have already done a part of the work, start at the first untranslated line ā€“ no need to redo the work!
  4. when you are done, subtitles need to be moved back into the main language. The simplest way is probably to open two browser tabs next to each other, one for the source language (in my case French Canadian) and the other for the target language (in my case, French). Once the target language is marked complete, it will show up as a playback optionĀ in the video.Ā 
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sorry I didnā€™t even see this thread!

So, I see where people are gathering to work together. Great!

Iā€™ve been watching Alberto do the deep troubleshooting research which took him to see the bug in http://www.amara.org. Awesome, and really surpassed my knowledge of the platform, which is quite basic.

I just want to add the possibility of downloading the language you translate from. (In translation lingo Iā€™ve seen it called the ā€œpivotā€ language, because it could be different from the original - say the original was in English, but you use the Spanish to translate into French, then Spanish would be your ā€œpivotā€.) Then you can work off-line, and finally upload the text with your translation. If you download the file with a ā€œsubtitles formatā€ (.srt and others), then the timetags are there for you, right between the lines with the content. So you can download, substitute, upload.

This works well if you intend to be the sole translator (a short piece, doable in one go). Iā€™m not sure how it goes if you do some percentage while others work in other parts. If you are in close communication with the other translators of your language youā€™d use email. If not, maybe an ethernet pad would do.

These are just options, forget them if they are confusing.

There are options other than amara.org: there was http://www.dotsub.com (old contender in the subtitle arena, maybe even before http://www.amara.org came in) and now youtube gives you the subtitles (with the added advantage of transcription from the soundtrack itself, but with - I think - a less mature transcription platform). And this script: http://google2srt.sourceforge.net

I think transcription-translation software is a moving target but the tools are pretty useful right now, and Iā€™m glad weā€™re using them.

Cheers!

24

German is done|

German was done by my brother Lorenzo, who is not on Edgeryders (nor on Facebook, Twitter, etc.). He is half-Austrian andĀ his German is exceptionally good for a non-native speaker, and perhaps a little sub par for a native one. Any native speaker wishing to improve on the translation will have everyoneā€™s gratitude.

Though I guess the French translation needs improvements even more, since I seem to have been the only one working on it, and my French is not great at all ā€“ even given Google Translate etc.

This brings the completed languages to 9, with two more (Polish and Portuguese) that were started.

25

German has been checked.

Have just finished checking and correcting the German translation. Thanks to Lorenzo for getting the initial heavy lifting done!

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oTranscribe.com

http://www.oTranscribe.com was found by Jay @thejaymo. It may be good but I tried it with too big a file. Itā€™s just audio, at the moment.

27

French translation

Hello Iā€™ll take over the french translation (already started reviewing the first seven minutes).

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Thanks Marc

Thanks for this, [Marc]. Please donā€™t be upset if I butchered the French language, I am still learning and thought translating the subtitles would be a good exercise. And it was!

29

No problem!

Hi Alberto no problem you did it quite well!

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A few questions

I have a few questions about words / sentences I donā€™t understand :

  • 1'46 : "... a fixed purpose but is a kind of ??? to use"
  • 6'26 : "... commercial stock ??? Europe"
  • 8'39 : "The things that are going forward" : does this mean : "The things that have the highest priority"?

Thanks!

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English subtitles

[Marc], why donā€™t you download the English subtitles?

  1. Go here.
  2. Click on the download button. 
  3. If you choose a subtitle format (like .srt) and open the downloaded file with a text editor, you'll find the timecodes next to each phrase. 
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And actually:

1:43 - 1:45

that doesnā€™t necessarily have a fixed purpose

1:45 - 1:47

but is kind of multi-use

[ā€¦]

6:22 - 6:26

  • a massive amount of unused housing stock,

6:26 - 6:29

and commercial stock, throughout Europe

8:39Ā no, I think it means ā€œthe things that we are actually working on at this timeā€

33

French translation done

Iā€™ve finished checking the french translation. Thanks to you Alberto for the great initial work!