Thursday

Official YouTube Channel for Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

The Official YouTube Channel for Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche has been updated. It now has over thirty videos of the Sakyong and Sakyong Wangmo, and many of them have captions in up to twelve languages.

Click here to go to the YouTube channel.

As the Sakyong said in his 2010 Harvest of Peace Letter:

With the arising dawn of human potential, it is time for our little world of Shambhala to take fragile steps into the greater world of unpredictability. We must now pay heed to our own credo: that sacredness and goodness can be created on this earth.

The channel provides a diversity of topics that can attract a wide audience. With hundreds of millions of people using YouTube, this will help make the dharma more available and easier to find. And for the billions of non-native English speakers throughout the world, the videos are available with captions in many languages.

Sakyong in Translation
So far about twenty of the videos are closed captioned in English. As reported in the Shambhala Times article Speaking all of Shambhala’s Many Languages for some months now, Chris Montone and Hamish Maclaren have been transcribing and captioning these videos, along with Leal Abbott.

To activate the captions, click on the CC icon beneath the video towards the right. The icon will turn red. When you move the mouse over it, different language options appear. You can also set your YouTube account to show captions in a particular language by default. While the “Featured video” on YouTube main pages does not show captions, if you click the link for the same video to the right, you can see the closed captions option. For people interested in how the dharma is translated into different languages, you can pause the video at any point and switch to another translation.

The captioned videos have now been translated as follows:

– Almost all are in Spanish, translated by Luz Rodriguez

– Six are in Chinese, by Yeachin Tsai,

– Five are in Portuguese and German
There is a group of six Brazilian Shambhalian translators working together to translated more videos into Portuguese.

– Three are in Greek
Tatiana Papas in Greece told us “Thank you for thinking of this wonderful opportunity and making the dharma available to more people, and especially to people with hearing difficulties. My sister is deaf and I have already sent her a link to watch the video on “Learning to Meditate.” She also finished translating “Motivation” into Greek before leaving for a retreat. She is hoping to do more when she gets back!

– Two are in Swedish, Italian and Czech

– Some are in Persian Farsi, Arabic, Korean, and Ukrainian.
Esther Rochon reported to the French Canadian translators that while she was in Kiev recently Vlad Zhurba, a young translator, and Aleksey Mikhanchuk, the young center director (and translator), were working one evening on translating Learning To Meditate into Ukrainian. Vlad had said that it hadn’t taken very long and they were happy with the results.

Learning to Meditate and Motivation have been translated the most. More translations are in the works, including Russian, Danish, French, Hebrew, and Romanian, and some may have been added by the time you the time you read this.

Reading the Full Transcript
In addition to the captions on the video, you can also see the whole transcript as the video is playing. Beneath the video box, toward the bottom right, there is a small Interactive Transcript icon (somewhat like a page with lines). Click the icon to open a pane, then you can see (and copy) the transcript (full text of the captions). You can choose any of the languages already captioned. Quite crafty. Although this too doesn’t seem to work on the “Featured video “ on the main page.

Linking to Shambhala
The Sakyong’s YouTube site also has links to other several Shambhala centers and organizations that have YouTube channels: The New York center, for example, offers videos of talks given there. Karme Choling and Dechen Choling also offer teachings on YouTube channels.

The Spread of Captioned Videos
Several centers now have these videos embedded on their own web sites, including the Shambhala Mountain Center, the Kootenay Shambhala Meditation Centre, and the Toronto Shambhala Center. The Kiev center has a video with Ukrainian captions, and a video of the Vidyadhara with Russian captions.

The Centro Shambhala de Meditação de São Paulo has a video with Portuguese translations.

The Taipei Shambhala Meditation Group in Taiwan links to this has several videos, although at the point of writing this not all are from the Sakyong’s YouTube site.

Centro de Meditación Shambhala de Santiago has many videos, although at the point of writing this not all are from the Sakyong’s YouTube site.

We continue to work on captioning these videos and looking for me ones that can be added. Hopefully this will be of benefit.

Click on the photo for the name and locations of these translators and international centers.