Amara.org Support Center

Thanks for starting this thread, Erin. 

Yes, I used the Google Translator Toolkit and I'll miss it. 

What I most liked about it was its collaboration friendliness. 

Not quite as clear-cut: the possibility to add one's translations to the GTT general thesaurus: I mean it was great when we and a teacher were collaborating on an English-Italian translation of a written tutorial. We hadn't noticed that the tutorial was full of double spaces, so when the GTT aspired it from the site, it interpreted the double spaces as periods and thus mis-split the text. For a couple of paragraphs, we corrected the splitting, removed the extra periods. But then we decided it would be faster to  remove the extra spaces with a text editor's find and replace, and reupload the correct result. We also deleted our first GTT project after having copied our work there. But wow, when we reuploaded the corrected text, the GTT automatically offered us our formerly translated parts, That was great. Nevertheless, a general thesaurus of all translations added in the GTT was a bit worrying, even if you were theoretically able to add them to your own private thesaurus instead of the general one.

I mean, it's like Google's sound recognition, which now provides remarkably good automatic captions, great speech-to-text resources - but also flags copyright infringements, sometime erroneously (if something in the public domain has also been reused by some corporation who banged their copyright on it, for instance).

Now if the GTT disappears on Dec. 4, will its version in the YT creators' studio subtitling tool also disappear? Because if the latter survives, then it will be possible to also use it for collaborative translation of texts that are not subtitles ;) Let's see then.

But even if that should disappear,  https://downsub.com lets you download not only existing subtitles, but also their automatic translation. 

There are "normal" online collaborative translation tools too: see Transifex that is used to localize the amara.org website. But those I've used - only as translator / coordinator - seem to require serious tech skills to set up a project. Hence the above suggestion of rather, hem, hijacking some simpler tools.

Best,

Claude

Apologies for the delayed replay: I wanted to first try Smart Cat, but there's been a daisy chain of family health issues - over now, thankfully.

Smart Cat feels a lot like GTT, with a few differences in the layout that will require some adaptation of user's habits. Unable to judge about the automated translation provided because the text I chose was too short. But it seems a good solution. AT-for-free option means users' edits will go to improve the thesaurus. Impatient to see what will happen with YouTube translating tool.

Best

Claude

-No change to the YT tool for translating subtitles, yeah! 

OK, no way to use thesauri, whether the general one or a personal one, but the tool could still be used to translate any text - not only subtitles - by editing the automated translation. 

• Upload a mock video to YouTube (like youtube.com/watch?v=XejH7tnOVKA that streams in the Amara Sandbox)
• Pretend you want to create subtitles in the language of the text you want to translate
• Choose Upload and upload your text, preferably with one paragraph for each sentence (or meaningful syntactic unit if the sentence is very long)
• Save your "original subtitles".

You can now pretend you want to translate them:

• Activate the "automatic translation" option
• If the automatic translation is too bad, use the "remove automated translations" option
• If it's usable for editing, improve it in the translation interface.

Once you're done, download your mock translated  subtitles. If need be, use the Remove line breaks tool. And you can also allow the community to "add more subtitles", i.e. to translate your text.

(I've been dabbling in this hijacking of subtitling tools for translation since 2009 :D)

Thank you, Stella!

Interesting aspect: it is really multiplatform, not only Mac and Windows, but also Linux - which I use ;)

Best,

Claude

Thank you for this suggestion, Jask Sun.

Best

Caude

Thank you for this question, Robert.

However the link you gave is to a google maps filter, not to a video.

Can you please give the link to the video you mean? 

Thank you in advance. 

Claude