Lingua

In February 2012, EngageMedia went live with some exciting technology: in partnership with Amara (Universal Subtitles) we’ve enabled online subtitling on all of EngageMedia’s videos. With our new Lingua Coordinator Seelan Palay, we’ve launched a Southeast Asia subtitling community for progressive video content, and you're invited.

Why and How
The 600 million people spread across Southeast Asia share a common set of challenges: climate change, human rights, freedom of expression, corruption and much more. With hundreds of regional languages, communication and collaboration can be difficult. Translation and subtitling could always help, but now it’s a whole lot easier.

Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF),  Amara is an easy to use captioning and translation platform which is currently in use by organisations such as Al-Jazeera, TED, and PBS NewsHour.

With the help of this tool, social justice and environmental campaigners across the region will be able to collaborate, share and make use of video works like never before.

What People Are Saying

"Using Amara is as easy as using your web browser. The more familiar you are with it, the more you like subtitling. And you feel like a video editor once you're done, you'll see how clips from remote areas expose issues you never realize exist." - Inda Tari, Freelance Translator, Indonesia

"Amara has made the subtitling process so much faster and less complicated. There's no need to install any software, so our reporters and volunteers can do subtitling from anywhere connected to internet." - Pong Pan, Journalist, Thailand

"Amara is very useful in terms of making my documentaries reach audiences of all ethnicities and nations. This application is also easy to use, providing subtitles in various languages for my videos, which can be edited at any time. I feel very proud that my Mother Tongue Tamil language can be entered as subtitles into my videos." - Sathis Kumar, Filmmaker, Malaysia

Join Us
There are thousands of videos on EngageMedia and around the region that could be of use to social and environmental campaigners. We can’t subtitle them all, we want to work with you to make it happen. The system is easy, seriously. If you can write an email you can do this. In fact you don’t even have to know another language - transcribing the video in the language you know is a critical part of the process.

You can see a great example with the 'Love Letter to the Solider' video. Now in 8 languages, this translation will help enormously in communicating the issue of West Papua to a bigger audience. We hope to open up such videos to broader audiences. Now more than ever people can tell their own stories, for themselves.

Interested in participating? Join the team on Amara, and our Facebook group, where we can communicate further with updates and requests.

Southeast Asia Subs Tour
Through 2012, Seelan, our Video Lingua Coordinator, will be travelling across Southeast Asia to do outreach and conduct workshops on Amara and online video distribution tactics and strategies.

You can read reports from some of the trips made so far to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. And if you’re interested in participating, or even being a local host, please contact us.

Seelan comes to us from Singapore, where he has a long and strong track record in promoting video activism as a tool for positive change.

The EngageMedia and Amara teams

Other resources:

• Amara Product Document
• Amara Product Document (Indonesian)
• Best Practices for Online Subtitling
• 7 tips on Best Practices for Subtitling
• How to use downloaded subtitle files on video players and editors

The Video Lingua project is supported by the Open Society Foundations (OSF).