Amara launches crowdsourced subtitling app for YouTube
Crowd-subtitling platform Amara.org has launched a free service allowing personal YouTube creators to invite viewers to subtitle their videos and sync the subtitles to their YouTube account.
The crowdsourcing option is available for free to all YouTube users, enabling them to invite viewers to translate their videos into dozens of languages. As well as the personal version Amara has also released a professional version of the feature for companies and organisations that want to take their channel global.
Current Amara customers include the likes of Netflix, Twitter, TED Talks and Google, who all use Amara’s Enterprise services to build their own dedicated subtitling communities, notifying members each time a new video is posted.
"Our goal is to make every video on the web accessible around the world,” said Dean Jansen, co-founder of Amara, “The only way to get millions of videos subtitled is if the viewers are invited to help. By making crowd subtitling available for any YouTube creator, we’re allowing them to reach more viewers in more languages, improve their SEO, and enable anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy their videos.”
To use the service YouTube users must connect their channel to Amara.org to include a link inviting users to help subtitle. When the subtitles are created by a user, for example a Spanish translation, they will be synced automatically back to the YouTube account and available on any site in which the video is embedded.
“The only way to get a video translated into the world’s languages is to invite the world’s viewers to help. No YouTube creator speaks every language and automated transcription and translation is still not high enough quality to understand the content of a video. But viewers watching from around the world are excited to help others watch. Now any popular video on YouTube can get high quality translations almost immediately. When a video goes viral, it can get huge everywhere at once,” said Nicholas Reville, executive director of Amara.