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Did I get here on a bad day or is this normal?

I'm a professional transcriptionist. I've been noticing how strange the transcripts on YouTube are. I used the Universal Demo for practice. (its not really working btw), and figured it out. I worked on http://www.amara.org/en/videos/igoJ6oN8Lhzy/info/gigi-22-i-remember-it-well/  Entering English language captions.

Of course I didn't notice that a computer or some non-English speaking translation had already captioned the English language for this video, and the video appears to be hosted on a Spanish-language site. (OY!)

When I go to YouTube, I am still seeing the Spanish language captions, and when I switch it to English, I am STILL seeing the "nonsense"-"HAL", "Hi I'm Anne in accounting"(computer-generated or non-English-speaking version)-gibberish version of the English caption.

Maybe I need to follow a team or group that speaks English, or who is working on a specific set of videos to avoid dealing with this?

I really like the work, and there certainly is A LOT of it to be done....and I have some ideas of course how I could maybe help people who are improving this project, but right now it really does appear to be a CF.

If anyone wants to reply, let me know if I should even attempt to help with this or will I just be wasting my time?



Hi Puppet Master,

I was hoping someone from Amara Staff would reply to you, but as they haven't: thank you for your post, which highlights several things that need to be explained more clearly on the Amara site itself and in the "Solutions" part of this Help: I hope they'll take your remarks into account in the next release of the software.

Attempting an informal reply:

Amara-made subtitles/captions only transfer automatically to YouTube if the YouTube channel owner has implemented the connection between his/her channel and Amara subtitles: that's why you're not seeing your Amara-made subtitles on the YouTube video.

As to the gibberish English subtitles you see on the YT video, they are indeed computer-made by YouTube, using Google's voice recognition, which is untrustable with the best-recorded spoken audio and totally hopeless with sung audio. However, when you click on the subtitles' button, they are very clearly labeled "English (automatic captions)" and onscreen, they appear between trebble parentheses.

You could contact the uploader of the YT video and suggest s/he adds the English Amara subtitles on his/her video.

 

This probably explains why some of my captions are not showing up on you tube. However, they are not showing up here, either (so far.) I have put in a ticket about that.


So, is there a way for us to know which channels on you tube are linked to Amara, so we don't waste our time captioning videos no one will see there?


Do the videos we caption here, show up on the Amara website, to be viewed? I'm unclear on the purpose of what we do.


PS I'm not with Amara. I just joined. I put my user name that way because then I know which one in my emails is for the forums and which is for the website, since they made me join once for the forums, and once for the caption section of the website (which makes no sense to me.)

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