Tag Archives: universal subtitles

Crowdsourcing the State of the Union

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Mozilla partners with public media to empower citizen engagement in U.S. election coverage

Tuesday’s State of the Union Address from U.S. President Barack Obama will include something special: crowdsourced captions and subtitles provided by everyday citizens around the world.

Using new web tools from Mozilla and the Participatory Culture Foundation, participants will transcribe and translate the President’s speech into dozens of languages in a matter of hours, making it more accessible to those with disabilities and in other countries across the globe.

Launching “Open Election 2012″

The event marks the launch of “Open Election 2012,” a new partnership  between Mozilla, PBS NEWSHOUR, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting  (CPB) and Participatory Culture Foundation.

Open Election 2012 will showcase how new open web technologies and citizen participation can make election coverage more accessible to diverse audiences, and provide new ways to engage with the news.

Adding context and interactivity with Mozilla Popcorn
Throughout the election, PBS NEWSHOUR will also use “Mozilla Popcorn,” a new HTML5 media tool Fast Company recently called “the future of online video.”

Popcorn makes it possible to pull other content and context from across the web right into the story, providing new ways for viewers to interact with video news.

Engaging and inspiring audiences
“It is part of the mission of public media to make our content available to everyone,” explained Hari Sreenivasan, Correspondent and Director of Digital Partnerships for PBS NEWSHOUR.

“From Chinese to Dutch, the speech translation is a true service for those for whom English is a second language and the hard of hearing. We hope to engage and inspire audiences too often forgotten.”

Learn more

Universal Subtitles on New York Times

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Alive in Egypt is helping volunteers translate voice-to-twitter calls from Egyptians and aggregate videos on the ground — and Universal Subtitles is helping make those videos translatable for the world. Universal Subs is also in action on this New York Times blog post, showing just how useful and well-adopted the tool is becoming. And proving its huge potential in global moments like these.

OK Go is throwing a party… and you’re all invited!

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OK Go are apparently big Universal Subtitles fans. The viral video superstars and committed champions of the open web just tweeted about the project to their nearly half a million followers — and are kicking off a Universal Subtitles “translation party” to translate their videos into multiple languages.

Join the party. And help build the next version of Universal Subtitles.

The translation party is a great contribution to an important Universal Subtitles goal: subtitling 10,000 videos by the end of 2010. At last count they’re almost half-way there — but they’ll need your help to push past the finish line in these last two weeks of December.

The Universal Subtitles community is also looking to raise $20,000 to help build the next version of their tool. And move from the current beta version to a full “1.0″ release early in 2011. Mozilla is matching all donations made before the end of the year, doubling your impact. So translate a video, make a donation, and dig those dancing puppies.

Universal Subtitles success story: 30 videos in 30 days

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To help launch last month’s beta version of “the world’s simplest subtitling tool,” Mozilla Drumbeat and Universal Subtitles asked for your help. The challenge: kick the tires on the new tool by using it to subtitle 10,000 videos by the end of the year. We’re now over 40% of the way toward that goal, with 4,179 videos submitted as of today. The early verdict: the tool works, really is ridiculously simple to use, and is already being adopted by high-profile partners like Wikimedia Commons and MIT. Even more impressive, it has a growing community of inspiring users behind it — including some prolific pros like Stenoknight.

From DNA to Dr. Seuss: 30 videos in 30 days

Stenoknight, aka Mirabai Knight, provides real time captioning services for the deaf and hard of hearing. She took up the Universal Subtitles challenge by captioning 30 videos over 30 days — from a 3D animation about DNA and how ribosomes make proteins, to BBC nature documentaries, to Dr. Seuss, to a music video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” interpreted into American Sign Language. Check out her awesome recap post here.

“Thanks again to Universal Subtitles for their amazing captioning tool, and if anyone else would like to attempt to caption 30 videos in 30 days, go for it! I’d love to see this idea catch on.” –Stenoknight

Ramping up the pace: can you help?

The next goal for Universal Subtitles: ramp up the pace of development toward a full “1.0″ release early in 2011. Right now the project has two developers working half-time on the project. The Universal Subtitles team is trying to raise $25,000 by the end of the year, which will allow those developers to work full time and push to get the tool from beta to 1.0. Mozilla is matching all donations until the end of the year, so please send Universal Subtitles some love this holiday season. You can help now by: