“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”                  ~ John Muir

Muir, a 20^th century naturalist, was certainly ahead of his time; before viruses were known, phones or radios used, even before U.S. National Parks – until he created the first one at Yosemite in 1899.  Muir knew “hitched-to-the-universe” experiences could come from sharing of nature.

It was a simpler time then; land was plenty, people few, and we didn’t really know as much about each other; we were still in discovery mode.  We could also claim ignorance to rape, famine, slavery, genocide, and even get away with it.

“We,” you say?  “’We’ could get away with it?”  “Not my problem, not my watch, nor my people,” most will exclaim, distancing ourselves from those “others.”

Yet now we can all see the earthquakes and hurricanes, feel the poverty and hunger, cringe at the Holocaust and Darfur, and who will forget 9/11?

By the same measure, we can celebrate Apartheid’s end and HIV’s decline, share the liberation of ‘Arab Spring” and the pride of a man on the moon.  We now know that human DNA is 99.9% the same.  And a new feature documentary film, Connected, by Tiffany Shlain explores this all brilliantly too.  So we get it; we’re related, connected, sometimes even reliant.

But could we go further?  Could humans connect more with each other?  Could we agree to truly universal basic human rights for all?  Could we actually become inter-dependent?

“In an interdependent relationship,” Wikipedia defines, “all participants are emotionally, economically, ecologically and/or morally self-reliant while at the same time responsible to each other.”

“Responsible to each other;” I like that; Response – able.  We sure respond to natural disasters around the globe well enough.

Except ongoing requests for food, water, medicine and equality require more listening, forethought and commitment.  “Proactive for each other” might be a bigger step in the right direction; Pro-Active interdependence.  Sounds nice, and how might we practice such interdependence – proactively?

Examples could be: car pooling, food coops, pot luck dinners, Wikipedia, Google Maps’ traffic updates using shared GPS signals, Ushahidi in Kenya maps civil unrest by SMS messages, Witness.org does it via user videos, and social media is rife with samples like Facebook, Twitter and Quora.

My favorite case in point, of course, is crowd-sourced video translation initiatives such as TED’s Open Translation Project, Adobe TV, Global Oneness.  Now dotSUB’s bold new “100 Translations Interdependence Challenge” will translate the inspiring short film A Declaration of Interdependence into a multi-cultural celebration of interdependence in action as volunteers from around the world translate the 4-minute film into as many different languages as possible. Apply here.

dotSUB’s translation process is fun, easy & rewarding for fluent multi-lingual volunteers.  Translators will be credited with their name on the websites of the Interdependence Day partner organizations including dotSUB, Connected – the film (opening September 16 in San Francisco, local US theaters thereafter), the Interdependence Movement, WE Campaign, Youth Now and other interdependent global organizations.

Projects like our 100 Translations Interdependence Challenge are dotSUB’s practicing of collaboration, connectivity and interdependence as a company, a team and as individuals who believe we are all an integral part of the universe.

“I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe,” writes Paul Coelho.

And now the 100 Translations Challenge is inside us too!

Many colleges today put their lectures online for free, and allow people from all over the world to follow the courses, if somewhat passively watching the video lessons. Recently Stanford University decided to go one step further, by not only opening its course in Artificial Intelligence to everybody, but by enabling those enrolling in the online course to also participate in interactive exercises, and be graded, receiving a statement of accomplishment at the end.

Originally expecting a few thousand applications at most, the initial signup page at AI-Course received over 130.000 (!) applications instead, from every corner of the globe. Here is a video of Sebastian Thrun, one of the directors of the course together with Peter Norvig, explaining it:

The course is based on the interactive platform being developed by Know Labs, which partnered with dotSUB to coordinate the crowd of passionate followers of the AI Course, creating captions for the hearing impaired, and translating them into foreign language subtitles. “We have students in 190 countries so foreign language subtitles are extremely important. We are excited to work with dotSUB to make our videos accessible to all our students,” says David Stavens, CEO of Know Labs.

• 130.000 students
• 170 languages
• 190 countries
• AI, and Robots
• Stanford

Does it  get any cooler, and more global than this?

If you are interested in attending the Stanford University AI Course, the official enrollment is still open. And if you want to volunteer for the translations of the course videos, let us know via Facebook, Twitter, or in the comments below!

This guest post is by Michael Novak, CEO of Tertia , and member of the dotSUB Board of Advisors. Tertia deploys enhanced SLS media worldwide for the music, video, and publishing industries.

Subtitling videos to reach a global audience is an efficient and effective way to communicate in a way that entertains, inspires, and informs. However, there is another way of using subtitling, in particular for videos with English audio, that brings some additional benefits: Same Language Subtitling (SLS).

Uniqueness of English media

Right now there are two billion people worldwide studying English, or who speak English as a second language (ESL). Interest in English media is driven by a desire to:

• get a good grade in an (often required) English class
• get a better (and higher paying) job.
• communicate internationally
• study internationally

Watch this video from TED, where Jay Walker explains this desire, this drive:

For a deep analysis of the English as a second language in the developing countries see also the paper “Dreams and Realities: Developing Countries and the English Language” (pdf).

Same Language Subtitling

SLS is subtitling in the same language as the audio portion of a video, with each word highlighted as the words are spoken or sung, in a karaoke style. This karaoke highlighting draws the eyes of the audience to the subtitle more than conventional methods.

SLS has been shown to double literacy rates in India among primary school children through its use on a variety of Indian television programs!

Adoption for the English as a second language audience

English language learning alone often means that individuals stop relating to English media once basic skills are learned. For the global ESL audience, the use of SLS English videos gives a significantly increased comprehension. This means that the ESL speaker has additional reasons to access English media beyond the first step of acquiring basic language proficiency, whether it be for entertainment, information, or access to educational media in other subject matters.

SLS English media has several advantages:

• Widest audience: The population of 2 billion ESL speakers exceeds the audience of any other language.
• Affluent audience: In non-native English-speaking countries, ESL speakers tend to be the most affluent.
• First stage to other languages translation: Captioning of English videos is a necessary first step to translation into other languages.

And also some disadvantages:

• Higher manual effort to subtitle: If done manually, the generation of timing information for each word spoken takes 10-20 times more time than just generating subtitles for each caption.
• A distraction for native English speakers: Because the animated nature of SLS English media, native speakers tend to watch the subtitles as well, thus diverting their attention from the video component. So the same feature that is helpful to the ESL audience tends to be a distraction for the native English speaker.
• Reduced emotional impact: Even for those who understand the video with SLS English, it lacks the emotional punch of the subtitles in their native language. So for media where emotional messaging is a necessary component, the native translations will have be more impact.

SLS English media reaches the widest audience of affluent consumers worldwide, and dotSUB has the modern technologies that make SLS easy to implement.

The confusion of tongues — the fragmentation of human languages — is described in the Bible’s Book of Genesis as a result of the construction of the Tower of Babel. The roots of this confusion may be open to question, but not the fact that it plays out daily in scenes large and small, all over the world. Most are not as funny as this video. When one doesn’t understand the sounds coming from another’s mouth, it is as though a heavy curtain is drawn, muffling sound and light, obscuring everything about that person that makes them human: their culture, their values, their sense of humor, their desires and loves and disappointments.

Consider this video illustrating the difficulties of “The Italian man who went to Malta“:

I found myself some years ago not quite in a hotel in Malta, but in the courtyard of a youth hostel in southern Italy. I was with a crowd of other backpackers who, having waited for the grounds to be opened, looked forward to a refreshing shower. It was at the end of a long, dry, hot afternoon in Tuscany, the kind of afternoon that made us feel like we’d been cooking in a Dutch oven. Inside, at the end of a long hallway that led to the showers, stood a middle-aged Italian man with a bulbous nose handing out towels. He spoke only Italian. There was a sign on the wall behind him: “caldo” with an arrow pointing to the right and “freddo” with an arrow to the left. We each took a towel and went left or right.

After the shower I came out to find two young Germans yelling at the man, who seemed bewildered.

“Kalt!” he yelled after them as they stalked off. “Caldo!”

As I speak some Italian and a smattering of German, I understood enough to know that the Germans were angry because they thought they had been directed to the hot shower, but they ended up in the cold shower.

“Kalt,” he said to me with a shrug. “Caldo. Cold.”

“No,” I said to him in Italian. “In inglese, caldo vuol dire ‘hot.’ Freddo vuol dire ‘cold,’ o kalt.” Meaning: the English translation of ‘caldo’ is not ‘cold’ even though they sound the same– it’s hot.

Lo these many years later I still remember the expression of awe, surprise, confusion and then clarity which spread across his face like the sunlight outside in the courtyard, as it dawned on him that the word meant the opposite of what he had thought. For how many months or years had he been directing travelers to the wrong shower?

I often think when I hear Chinese or Arabic or some other language about which I have no inkling, that we in our different cocoons stand in those lines, waiting to be directed by a man who doesn’t speak our language, day after day, week after week, year after year, to the wrong place. You might say that’s a big part of what we do here at dotSUB: making it possible for men and women from Malta to the Middle East, from China to Chile to get into the right line and share their stories in a way that everyone can understand. Stories of bankers to the poor and tweets for the masses, where you can learn about personalized learning and just about everything in between.

We think that’s hot and caldo. Hot enough to summon a beach.

The Singularity Summit, a TED-Style Conference on AI, Business, and Emerging Technologies, will be held October 15-16 in New York City, hosted by the Singularity Institute. The conference will focus on the victory of IBM Watson on the game show Jeopardy! and how the technology of AI with “common sense” can be extended into dozens of profitable domains. Speakers include Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram, Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel, and more. Subjects covered by talks include entrepreneurship and investing in an age of accelerating change, cutting-edge developments in robotics, and the concept of the technological Singularity. You can register today for the 2011 Singularity Summit today!

dotSUB partnered with the Singularity Summit to enable the global reach of its videos on these important subjects.

Internet consumers must be given experiences that are equal to, if not better than, the experiences provided when content was originally aired on television, is the new mandate included in the  July 13 report by FCC’s Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee on the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.

So next January, advanced captioning for live and near-live programming must be online. By next July, all prerecorded programming “substantially edited” for the Internet must be captioned.  Carriers of Internet media must support closed-captioning and end-user display in terms of language, character color, opacity, size, edge, background and font.

“User settings are new to players which support Internet-delivered video, and will require time and effort to implement,” the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee report said.

The new rules allow for Internet delivery of the single standard interchange format now used for digital television. Distributors can transcode for various playout options — such as proprietary or browser-based players — as long as the captioning characteristics are maintained.

Media giants Time-Warner, CNN and Netflix have all been recently sued in City, State and Federal Courts for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by not providing the deaf with equal access or closed captions to “watch instantly” digital video, archived news and programming.

“The lack of captioned videos means that millions of people with hearing loss will continue to be denied equal access to video news content on CNN.com,” Anna Levine, the plaintiffs” attorney in the suit, said.

The Netflix lawsuit also states: “While streaming (video) provides more access to entertainment to the general public, it threatens to be yet another barrier to people who are deaf and hard of hearing.”

Consequences – legal costs, lost audiences, brand damage – for non-compliance seem serious now, and look like they are just getting started.

More Resources:

dotSUB’s General Overview: U.S. Accessibility Regulations for Online Video Captions

Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (October, 2010): Signed by President Barack Obama

Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee (July 2011): First Report on Closed Captioning of Video Programming Delivered Using Internet Protocol

Broadcast Engineering.com (July 2011): FCC sets six-month deadline for Internet closed captioning

KTVU.com (June 2011): CNN Being Sued For Lack Of Closed-Captioning Online

Paid Content (June 2011): Deaf Group Sues Netflix Over Lack Of Captions On Instant Viewing

National Association of the Deaf (NAD)

The Yallah Film Festival is the first ever short film festival dedicated to the Arab Awakening.

We’ve been following very closely and with great emotion, enthusiasm, and passion the events that have been occurring since January 2011 in the Arab World.

These “Arab Spring Revolutions”, as coined by the press, have given way to the most extraordinary events of the 21st Century: tens of millions of people protesting for freedom and democracy, the overthrowing of some dictatorships by non violent protests and gatherings.

The goal of the festival is to give a chance to all the creators within the Arab geographical area to talk about their daily life through an original video creation, whether fiction, documentary or film shot with a mobile phone, with the goal of giving the viewers an impression of what their life looks like now.

The Yallah Film Festival gives a chance to all film makers to tell their stories of the Arab Awakening by sending their Dramas (3 minutes), Documentaries (3 minutes) and Mobile Films (1 minute).

All the films published online will be subtitled in English by a group of volunteer translators from Translators without Borders.

The Yallah Film Festival wants to highlight new talents from the Arab world and help them emerge. So take a chance and send your film! A selection Committee of the organizers will present a selection of 50 to 70 films on September 26th of 2011, and a prestigious Jury will then assign the Prizes.

The Prize Ceremony will occur at the prestigious Arab World Institute in Paris on October 19th of 2011, in front of 400 cinema enthusiasts and professionals.

The message of the Yallah Film Festival is a message of peace and positive aspirations. The spirit of the festival is to go beyond the overwhelming violent images that have been spread everywhere on the Internet and the TV News, and each film submitted will be moderated before publication, selected first of all on a quality basis.

The Yallah Film Festival, organized by MobilEvent with the support of dotSUB and other media partners, is not for profit. Visit the “How can I help ?” page to learn how you also can support it.

Who can participate ?

Participation in the Yallah Film Festival is open to every professional, semi-professional directors, video enthusiasts, just about anyone making films. If you want to take a stance or testify on the tremendous events that have been occurring in the Arab world since January 2011, just go ahead: we would love to see your film.

Here is one of the first entries in the festival:

“Ghassan El Hakim – Mamfuckinch
To take the street or not, that’s the question. For the love of a king?! What if we didn’t love him? Will they call us traitors? Morocco is in a ferment, and the youth is not ready to give concessions. It’s not a simple wave and it’s called “mamfuckinch”, and soon in your streets ;) “

This guest post is by Robin Kent, Founder of The Fearless Group, an Advertising Consultancy, former Chairman & CEO of Universal McCann, and member of the dotSUB Board of Advisors.

If the purpose of advertising is to grab the consumer’s attention, how do you do this with over 48 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every minute?

One way is targeting. It has always been important, but in this new overcrowded environment it is more vital than ever before.  The good news is there are plenty of techniques and data for ensuring advertisers get this right more often than they get it wrong.  Assuming advertisers get the targeting right, is that enough to ensure the consumer understands and acts upon the message?  Perhaps, but could subtitles ensure more consumers see and understand the message. That is a question worth exploring.

Let’s first look at the global world of advertising. In 2011 it’s estimated that $460 Billion will be spent on advertising trying to convince consumers to try new products, stay loyal to existing ones, maybe switch to a competitor’s brand or upgrade to a newer, better, faster version and in general just consume more.

Today only a small portion of this spend will go to video online, but it is never the less an important sector and one which is growing rapidly.  In 2011 digital video advertising in the USA is estimated to be worth $2 billion doubling to $4 billion by 2013.

Advertising is predominantly a local business.  By that I mean although the major global brands sell a similar product market to market, they are very much locally managed, often locally produced and packaged to account for local languages and laws.  Because each market is expected to be profitable from local sales, marketing budgets are also created locally and this often leads to locally produced ads.  In other words, Coca-Cola ads are not necessarily the same market to market. For example, in Spain it’s Coke Light and in the USA Diet Coke—same product, but a very different spin on the values, benefits and image portrayed.

Why is this?  We often hear today that as global consumers we have more in common than not. This may be true of certain brands such as Gucci, Patek Philippe, Porsche, Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton, Singapore Airlines or Emirates Air. However, the majority of the world’s six billion people consume local brands or local variations of global brands. When little children from China visit America for the first time they’re shocked when they see a familiar fast food chain.  “They’ve got McDonald’s here, too?”

If we accept that the vast majority of consumers consume local brands (even if they’re often from global advertisers), then advertising should speak to them in their own language taking into account the local nuances and customs.

But good advertising can be expensive to create.  So can bad advertising, but that’s a discussion for another time.  For a TV or video commercial every second must count.  Actors, locations, directors and film crews all cost money. To shoot an individual commercial for every country is prohibitively expensive for most advertisers, even some of the biggest.  Just because the budget in the USA can justify a “Hollywood” style production, that’s most likely beyond the reach of markets such as Chile, Vietnam, or India.  But the brand’s values must be adhered to wherever the brand exists.

One solution is subtitling. For a small additional cost a video commercial could be made for, say, India’s official 22 recognized languages without losing the power film has over other forms of advertising—the ability to tell a story, using sight, sound, movement, drama and humor.

As an advertiser in the USA do you make a version in English and one for the fast-growing Hispanic population or use subtitles to reduce the cost?

Each advertiser must decide based on the many factors that define their brands, but I think subtitling should at least be considered.

This is a guest post by Kirti Vashee, VP Enterprise Translation Sales at Asia Online and member of dotSUB’s Board of Advisors.  You can also read Kirti’s blog eMpTy Pages, where he writes about  translation technology, localization and collaboration.

The phenomena of a crowd or community stepping forward and doing real translation work, often for no direct financial compensation is something that troubles many in the professional translation world. Mostly because they see this activity as work being taken away from legitimate professionals or they see it as a ploy to reduce prices.

While in some cases their fears may actually be justified, in the most successful uses of this approach I think it is clear that this is not true.If we look at some of the most successful examples of crowdsourced translation in practice, we can see that they have many if not all of the following elements in common.

A Crowd/Community That Is Invested

TED Open Translation Project – Volunteer translators are often inspired by the content and wish to share it with their friends and countrymen. June Cohen has said that the volunteer translators in general do better quality work than the many of the paid professionals, who in itially did a few translations to seed the project because of their passion for the subject. This effort has now enabled almost 20,000 translations into 80+ languages of really challenging material.

Facebook –  Users who wish to build and expand the friend community in their particular language group. This effort has enabled Facebook to grow rapidly in international markets and accomplish very rapid coverage across 60+ languages. Had they used traditional means to do this it may have taken them years to get to the same point.

Microsoft –  MVPs (top accredited reseller partners) who wish to make technical support knowledge about Microsoft products more easily and widely available in their markets. Their efforts are rewarded by lower support costs and also an increase in product sales as more and more users look for self-service knowledge base information.

Asia Online – Student users provide corrective feedback to continue to improve the translation quality of the Wikipedia and other knowledge content that is initially done by highly customized MT engines and paid translators.
The students themselves will be the primary beneficiaries of this content, and their efforts will enable them to access high quality educational information. The volume of this information will likely increase a thousand fold.

Yeeyan:  150,000 volunteers who translate tens of millions of words on a regular and timely production schedule because they view what they do as high social value.

Software Infrastructure That Facilitates Contribution & Participation

In all of the cases above the companies involved crowdsourced translation initiatives need to invest in software that enables tasks to be parceled out, evolve as tasks change, enable efficient administration, maintain quality, gather feedback, and build self-sustaining eco-systems. The tools developed by dotSUB, Lingotek, Yeeyan and Asia Online are all unique collaboration and translation workflow management tools that enable these kinds of initiatives, They make little or no use of industry standard tools like Trados and TMS because of the highly proprietary, rigidity and archaic nature of these tools. These new-generation tools are much more open and are designed to evolve with technical and process advances on the internet today.

The Importance of Engagement and Higher Purpose

It is interesting to note that translation is not the primary business of any of the companies listed in the examples above. In every case the goal and intent is to make more information available faster. Even for many of the corporations that are exploring crowdsourcing, the rationale is more about customer engagement than cost savings. It is also important to note that none of these initiatives could even be attempted without the use of automation and large-scale community support and they are enabling initiatives that would not be possible otherwise. This is also true for Facebook who still had to use professionals to translate legalese that their community was not interested in translating.  The role of communities is likely to increase in future as more of the world comes online.

As we move forward we will see much more video come online and already it is clear that the old approaches will not enable us make this new content multilingual in effective timeframes, crowdsourcing and automated translation will be necessary tools for an organization that seeks to communicate across the globe. As Clay Shirky has pointed out, the ‘cognitive surplus’ of the online population is a force that can be harnessed under the right circumstances and for the right purposes. It is likely that the professional translation world is going to see significant disruption in the coming years, as innovators figure out how to build sustainable models around community engagement, technology and organizational mission.