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Ask HN: How to legally translate materials and make it accessible for many more?

by pezo1919 on 2/18/22, 2:21 PM with 4 comments

An urgent problem nowdays is that really few are trustworthy in the current media scene. Alternative (not mainstream) media, youtube/rumble/odysee etc have some really good content creators, but they all focus on a single language.

How can I/we make their work accessible for masses (for other languages)? I have no right to translate and post their material, but to make a translation available they have to do extra work each time. I doubt someone like Russel Brand with 5M subscribers is going to even recognize such an attempt in his email/comment section and it’s impossible for every translator candidate (who might do a great job but has limited time so can do 30mins of translation/month) to deal the with each content creator.

Any ideas?

  • by pjc50 on 2/18/22, 3:41 PM

    The short answer is that you require permission to do it legally.

    There's a long tradition of "fansub" media, though, for things like anime. It circulated on VHS long before youtube.

    > trustworthy

    A more general problem with translations: now you've got to trust the translator. There's lots of room for distortion and loss or change of nuance, whether deliberate or accidental.

  • by _448 on 2/18/22, 11:42 PM

    There is a non-profit organisation that is providing tools to users to translate English content to other languages: https://translationcommons.org/academy/tools

  • by jazzyjackson on 2/18/22, 4:55 PM

    Even the single language captions are mostly left to software and get it wrong often enough to be useless; youtube used to have a "community captioning" program, dont know what happened to that. At least on tiktok there's an etiquette of captioning the video yourself so it can be enjoyed on mute.

    When I pirate a movie I can lookup corresponding .srt files to add captions in any language.

    Maybe a browser extension that allows people to share caption tracks or alternate audio streams tagged to a video hash or url.

  • by programmarchy on 2/18/22, 5:20 PM

    Maybe you could write a browser extension that injects your curated subtitle sources into video track tags?