Translations

Providing translations is extremely helpful for the community, making videos more accessible helps us all!

Every video will have two files linked on its respective page.

  • a subtitle file containing:
    dialogue, text formatting

  • a caption file containing:
    dialogue, text formatting, speaker identifiers, audio descriptions

These are provided in a TTML format.* Youtube doesn’t perfectly support TTML, but it does allow us to style the text with color and positioning. If you’re familiar with HTML and SCC, it looks a lot like that, if you’re not, you should still be able to identify where the dialogue is.

You can either edit these files in a text editor or in dedicated caption software, whichever you prefer.

*Only the latest videos are currently in TTML, earlier videos use EBU STL and SRT. I plan to conform all to TTML for consistency when I get the chance.

TEXT EDITORS: I like VS Code and Notepad++, but I imagine most should work fine. Using a text editor will reveal all of the tags that are used to structure the captions, you won’t need to edit these, it’s just more to look at. All of the lines of dialogue can be found in the body tag.

CAPTION SOFTWARE: I highly recommend Subtitle Edit, which is my own personal means of caption editing. It’s free and highly customizable! You can load up the caption track and the video file (if you have a youtube rip, otherwise I can provide a video file upon request.) This has a lot of quality-of-life improvements compared to a simple text editor, so I recommend familiarizing yourself with the hotkeys to be able to churn through captions as quickly and easily as possible.

Either way, just run through and replace each line with its respective translation. Please don’t get too creative with descriptors, i.e. don’t change “[crickets]” to “[crazy loud crickets going ‘chirp chirp’]”. It may seem ridiculous, but I’ve seen some really out-there atmospherics and we just have to remember that it’s important that these don’t make it harder to understand what’s happening for people who really need it. That said, adages and slang don’t always translate directly so it’s reasonable that sometimes you have to take liberties in the translation. Just try to represent the original captions as close to how they were intended as reasonably possible.

Once you’ve reached the end of the file, you can save it and email the file to ping@emergentbeacon.com including “Translation” in the subject of the email. Please only send completed translations. Be sure to let me know which video it’s for and what language you’ve translated it to so that I can update the appropriate video as quickly and easily as possible. Also, feel free to let me know how you wish to be credited and I will add you to the description of the video accordingly.

One last note regarding labor. Captioning is tedious work, this I am acutely aware of. I would pay for translations if this show were remotely profitable. Alas—please only take this up if you’re comfortable doing so as volunteer work. If you choose to do so, thank you for contributing to the videos and making them easier for others to enjoy; if not, thanks for reading along and continue advocating for accessibility!

- brandt