The past couple of months we’ve been busy publishing the multilingual Polyglot Gathering Online 2021 talks onto our YouTube channel. We’d like to improve the accessibility of the videos allowing the deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and viewers who speak other languages to fully enjoy the wonderful content we publish.

Would you like to volunteer and make the videos more accessible and inclusive?
Help us create subtitles and captions for the videos!

How can you do so? It’s simple!

• Create an account on amara.org, which is very user-friendly;
• Go to the Amara Public Workspace:
  • Have you already picked a YouTube video you want to create subtitles for? Great! Copy-paste the name of the video in the “Videos added by others” search bar and select it.
  • Do you want to find a Polyglot Gathering video to add subtitles to? Click here to visit a list of the videos from Polyglot Gathering Online 2021 and click here to find the other Polyglot Gathering videos.
• Once you have chosen your video, click on the “Add/Edit” button, select the language spoken in the video and the language of the subtitles you want to add, lastly click “Add”.
• You can then start subtitling the videos!
  • To know more about how to caption a video, check out this fantastic guide made by the Amara team.
  • If the video is already captioned in another language and you want to translate it or use it as a guide, then this guide made by the Amara team might also help you out.
• When finished, download the subtitle file, preferably in the VTT format.
• Email us at subtitles@polyglotgathering.com with the file as an attachment, or a link of your preferred file transfer tool (Google Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer…).
• We will then add your subtitles to the YouTube video. Thank you!

This might seem a bit over engineered… It is! You see, it used to be much simpler before, but in September 2020, Google removed the “Community Contributions” subtitling feature. Check out Google’s statements here and here for more information. At some point in the future a new “Trusted Captioner” system will be integrated into YouTube, which we will consider using once the details and the feature have been released. Till then, the best option we’ve found is to use Amara and manually send the VTT files.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to let us know at subtitles@polyglotgathering.com.