Videos on YouTube come with a quite sophisticated integrated subtitling tool, that we can use to easily sub our videos and translate existing subtitles.

Our channel containing all the videos we uploaded so far: yunity on Youtube

Everthing you find there can be subbed in whatever language you can do it in!

Youtube Subtitle Overview

The table below lists the videos currently on the yunity Youtube channel and what language subtitles were already published for which video.

Accessing the subbing tool on Youtube

To access it, one needs to visit the video that is going to be subbed, go on the options in the menu on the bottom right corner of the video window (marked green in the screenshot below), select subtitles and then click 'add subtitles' (also marked green).

This opens another tab, that should look like this one:

Creating subtitles (online or offline) and proofreading

First you always have to choose the language you want to work with. If somebody already submitted subtitles in the selected language, they will be visible to proofread. If you want to create new subs, you can start from scratch and set everything yourself, or you can use the timing of already existing subs. Normally the existing English subtitles are displayed by default, you can however make use of other subtitles as well by uploading the sbv-file of them.

If you prefer to work offline you can download the existing English subs. After you indicated a language in which no subs currently exist you can click 'Options' (or maybe 'Actions'..? It says 'Aktionen' in the German user interface, sorry i have never seen the English one... >< ) on the upper right and then select 'download'. That should provide you with an sbv-file that contains the subs and can be opened in a simple text editor. There you can save it as e.g. a txt-file and then work on a train, near the next lake or wherever you don't have internet access but time and space to work.

If possible, we'd love for every new submitted set of subtitles to be proofread by another teammember who also knows the language the subs were created in. However, if you are the only one on our team, who happens to have these specific language skills, we will trust you of course. But be extra careful then, and proofread your own work before submitting it, please!  

What to keep in mind when subtitling

Subtitles should be easily readable. To accomplish this goal please have a look at the following tips:

• It is not about mirroring what is spoken when it comes to timing and phrasing, but about transporting the content of the video, so don't hesitate to correct grammatical mistakes in the spoken language and rephrase unclear parts of speech.
• Don't transcribe or translate filler words like 'erm', 'like', 'you know' and the likes, if they don't add to the feeling of the scene, because they never add to the informative value.
• Don't hesitate to break the speech in multiple frames to avoid having three or more lines of subtitles displayed at once. Two lines is the maximum, one is best!
• Same-language subs (aka transcriptions) should start a splitsecond before the talking begins and last at least a split second longer then the speech. Just watch well subbed videos (like TED Talks for example) and you'll see what is meant by that!
• It often is the case, that different languages need different timing of subs, so that coherent parts of a sentence always end up in one frame. If you take the timing already provided by subs of another language, please look at the timing and readability again and don't just translate what's in the existing captions.
• Please watch the time a caption is shown to adapt the amount of text it shows!
• If nicely possible, please set manual line breaks using shift+enter!

Translating video descriptions

Youtube comes with a handy function to store multilingual video descriptions. These can only be implementend by someone who is logged in with the yunity account. To still enable you to help with the translation, we created a googledoc per video where we collect translations. Just give Janina a heads-up on Slack when you added a new translation, so that the video description can be updated as soon as possible and you can admire your work!

Our use of this feature is still in its early stages and we actually have not yet found out how normal users can actually profit from these multilingual description options. If you happen to know more about this, please do tell us on Slack!