Saturday

Online Multilingual Video Captioning Project Underway

For the last several months, Hamish Maclaren, Chair of the Accessibility Working Group of the Sakyong’s Council, and Chris Montone, Director of Shambhala Europe and have been collaborating on a project to make Shambhala teachings more available to people who are deaf or have hearing impairments, and to the many–six billion or so–non-native English-speakers worldwide. Both of these groups are ones that Shambhala is very much committed to serving and providing ever-improving accessibility to.

In their spare time, Chris and Hamish, with the enthusiastic support of Shambhala Media and Shambhala Information Technology Services, have been transcribing into English and captioning (subtitling) into various languages online video teachings of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Starting with short videos that have already been posted online either on Shambhala.org or Sakyong.com, at least 18 video teachings–most under 10 minutes long–have been transcribed and captioned into English so far. Our goal is to eventually make these videos available for Shambhala Centres and Groups to use on their websites or for their open house/open evening events.

The group is using software available from dotSUB.com, which allows multiple translators to log in and work with the files simultaneously, and makes new translations very easy to add in. If you’d like to see a sample video, just visit the Shambhala Times and look near the bottom of the right column on just about any page. There you’ll see a video called “Learning to Meditate”. The video allows you to easily select the caption language of your preference–English, Spanish, Persian (Farsi ) or Chinese (traditional or simplified). Another video on “Motivation” is also publicly viewable with captions in Czech, English, Spanish, and Swedish.

In this task, we have been greatly helped by several members who have very generously offered to proofread and translate the captions into other languages. Translators for Chinese, Czech, Spanish, French, Swedish and Farsi have recently joined the group and have begun captioning into those languages. Thank you very much to all of them!

We are currently looking for more volunteer translators in more languages. If you’d like to help, please contact either Hamish (maclaren@earthlink.net<a href=”maclaren@earthlink.net”) or Chris (<a href=”director@shambhala-europe.org”).

For more information on Shambhala’s Accessibility and Disability work, please click here. Also see the German and French, Spanish language sections of the Shambhala Times.

From: Shambhala Europe Blog