Translating the DASH School videos

Recently on the DASH Spanish channel on Telegram there has been a lot of talk about localization of the DASH news, and one of the latest most interesting things in the community is the creation of DASH School, a Youtube series dedicated to explaining the basic concepts of cryptocurrency, blockchain and finally DASH itself.

The series is hosted by Amanda B Johnson who work as a Teacher explaining how all these works.

The videos are great, short and to the point, and I think it can work wonders on people still lost about Bitcoin, and the blockchain. I wrote a post here on steemit about it. However, there still the language barrier and I think this language barrier could be solved by doing some subtitles.

It would be awesome to recreate this videos with our own host, but the QA could vary and also, might be a bit more expensive to achieve.

Translating her words on the video could be quick enough to get this videos already edited and with great sound and video quality to the masses. However, even thought this is an easier task, still a lot of translation to do. Luckily there is already a transcription of the video.

Now we need to organize on this translations, DASH already have a dedicated service for the project specially aiming at handling localizations called Transifex. I've used this service in the past and is really good. Specially when you need to translate in groups and you need a 2 tier activity.

One for translation, and the other for reviewing, the translator try to get this as fast as possible, and the reviewer will spend more time reading and matching the script with the context of the conversation, providing feedback and approving changes.

Finally there is also the creation and maintenance of a translation memory capable of suggesting words for common terms, these terms are created on the fly making it easier for the translator from committing the same mistake again and again.

One thing to remember is that these strings are not just regular strings for translation, and these are subtitles, so the subtitles have a different format. They have a time stamp that handles the time period that the string should appear on the video.

Here is a screenshot of the Transifex interface:

This is important since the scripts needs to be converted from their subtitle format to a native translation format like po or xliff or other translation formats that Transifex can process.

Well so far, I have been doing a manual translation directly on the subtitle format using a Qt app called Subtitle Composer. Is the one you can see at the start of the article and so far is working good for me, although I am committing a lot of spelling and grammar errors. I hope that the wordproofing stage can handle all those.

Wish me luck, will keep going at it until I have all the localization up on youtube.

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About me:
Steemer, crypto fan, like to listen to 90s hip hop, and loves to chat about Linux Python and Free software. Runs a local Tech club in sunny Cancun, and enjoys hoping on planes and landing somewhere else.