Amara.org Support Center

The translation issue I'll illustrate here is related to the When captioning/subtitling goals differ one I wrote about in August. But it is made more severe due by Amara Developers' recent decision to subordinate translated subs to original subs.

Concrete case: failure to provide usable French subs for Accessing Love And Forgiveness - a video page added to the Fetzer Institute team, which I joined.

The existing English subs are perfect as captions for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, but they cannot be translated from with the Amara translation widget to make usable subtitles in other languages, because they don't include subs for the English texts written in the video, which need to be translated too for people who don't know English.

So I decided to make French subtitles that include these texts, and then upload them to the video. I made them in http://dev.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/Bt3ivf3RHsoj/fr/118770/ on the Amara developers' platform and downloaded them as an .srt file. However, when I tried to upload them to Accessing Love And Forgiveness in order to create French subs there too, the software replied:

Sorry, we couldn't upload your file because the number of lines in your translation (65) doesn't match the original (51).

This is absurd. It must be possible to have different subs for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people (where repeating in the subs what's written in the video would be redundant) and for translations in other languages (where these texts must be translated in subs). And it WAS possible on Amara until developers decided that all subtitles for a video must have the same number and the same sync'ing as the subs in the original language.

Video hosting platforms that allow adding CC subs by uploading a file - e.g. YouTube or the Internet Archive - do not require this identical synchronization between different sets of subs for one video. Professionally translated subtitles are sync'd directly with the video, independently from the subtitles in the original language: that's one of the great feature of CC subtitling.

So why this hierarchic imposition? Did perhaps some team owners complain that when translated subs were independent from the original ones, you didn't get the translation interface when editing them?

Tough titty: the possibility to make usable translated subs is far more important. And in the case of Accessing Love And Forgiveness, it is absolutely necessary, because the video is a remarkable illustration of how to use both captions - for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people - and audiodescription - for Blind people - in order to implement Universal Design. Hence it is essential that the translated subtitles for people who don't know English convey all the video content, including the content given in written form in the video.

So either Amara developers re-enable the possibility to make translated subs that are independent from the original ones - or quality subtitling in other languages will have to move to another service. And that would be a pity, because Amara still preserves a part of the open, useful characteristics that made its success when it was Universal Subtitles.

This being said, I attach the .txt file generated by the http://dev.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/Bt3ivf3RHsoj/fr/118770/  subs, if anyone should want to use it to translate the English subs of  Accessing Love And Forgiveness. But I won't.

The parts in italics should be changed to plain text, because YouTube cannot render them properly: it puts the <i> </i> tags instead.

Claude, you bring, as usual, really insightful points on the usage of Amara for greater communities. 

As we've mentioned, not being able to create subtitles directly from the video is not something we removed on purpose, but was an unfortunate consequence of changing other code in our system to fix a different issue. And we do intend to bring back not only the opportunity to create separate subtitles directly from the video, but also to change timing for those videos that were created from a different subtitle. 

Amara has been outgrowing its code, and in the same way there are only so many times we could turn down the hem of a pair of pants or let out a shirt, we have come to the point where we are working on making new code for Amara that will be more flexible and grow with it. 

All these suggestions and observations are being taken into account to make Amara more usable. We appreciate them a lot since they give us greater insight into our users needs. Pleae be reassured that we are working hard to make Amara easier and better to use and also a lot more flexible to different users needs.