GTS Blog

I traveled to Germany a few weeks ago and as I usually do before a long flight, I looked for a good book to read on the flight. Being a huge Applefile and Steve Jobs fan, I jumped at the chance to buy the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. This was not the first Isaacson biography I have read, after reading his Albert Einstein biography last year. Here are some of my thoughts on this book:

Don’t walk to buy this book, run to buy it! This is a great book and probably one of the best I have ever read for sheer captivation. Seriously, I could not put this book down. It reads like a thriller novel, the pace is tight and the events unfold fast and furious. What made it even more fascinating for me is that I remembered a lot of the events depicted in the book at the time that they occurred.

Buy it in hard-cover. I’m usually too frugal to buy hard-cover books. This time I did not see a paperback and bought the hard-cover. And it was worth every penny. True it makes lugging it on planes and trains a bit more difficult, but the reading experience is so much better. Paperbacks get dusty, the paper is thin, the ink tends to smudge and the type is small. And you may look like a hippy if you carry it in the back pocket of your blue  jeans. The hard-cover is much nicer read. (Don’t ask me about Kindles or iPads as I don’t own either).

Steve Jobs’ led a tough life. Most people can only dream of being a Billionaire at the age of 25 like Steve. And Steve dated some of the most beautiful women around (including famous women like Joan Baez). He had his own plane and houses all over the world. Yet after reading the book, I don’t think that many people would want to live his life. His childhood was messed up knowing that his real parents dumped him; his adolescence was marred by heavy drug use; he had to work the graveyard shift at Atari after people complained that he smelled (Steve did not believe in taking showers on a regular basis). Soon after he achieved success at Apple, his own board fired him and it took him 11 years to get back. And almost as soon as he did get back the cancer took over and one can say that the last 10 years of his life were ones of constant pain and anguish.

Steve Jobs was an emotionally disturbed person. Once you read the book you’ll know exactly what I mean. But I just want to mention one thing. Steve was said to have weeped on many occasions in business discussions and negotiations. And Steve was quoted as saying in this book that certain product designs made him cry. What kind of person weeps at meetings? Someone very fucked up (sorry to use profanity).

Steve had some soft spots. Most of the descriptions in the book paint an ugly picture of Steve. He was extremely mean to many people. He was inconsiderate to a fault. But on the other hand he was kind and loving to his wife and children; and he was a big believer in education. One of the things that impressed me was his strong desire to live long enough to see his son Reed graduate from high school.

Translation was not mentioned in the book even once. Most of you know that I usually blog about translation-related topics. But the topic did not come up at all in the book.

I also read recently that a movie about Steve is coming out soon starring Ashton Kutcher. I don’t think I’ll waste my time and see it since Hollywood usually tends to distort reality by taking everything over-the-top. Since Isaacson’s  book was sanctioned by Steve Jobs and his wife Laura, my guess is that it is pretty accurate.

Related articles

• Ashton Kutcher is not playing Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Walter Isaacson: ‘The key to understanding Steve Jobs’ (news.cnet.com)
• Ashton Kutcher Believes Steve Jobs Role Meant for Him (macrumors.com)
• Walter Isaacson: This Is Why Steve Jobs Was A Great Entrepreneur (AAPL) (businessinsider.com)

About two years ago I wrote a blog post about a YouTube feature that allows you to automatically subtitle movies in different languages. Recently, due to a renewed interest in localization of video clips, I had the opportunity to play around with YouTube’s Closed Captioning feature. Does it work? Well the automatic stuff does not work well but YouTube does give you some nifty tools that make it easy to translate movie subtitles. And with a little work you can get decent results.

Why should you subtitle your own videos?

A lot of companies upload video clips on YouTube for corporate marketing, product tutorials, instructional videos and such. Providing these movies with translated subtitles can make them available to a broader audience. Furthermore, close captioning makes the videos available to people with a hearing disability. And recently, SEO experts are saying that close captioning of videos helps drive traffic to your video-enabled web pages.

Creating the subtitles

After you have uploaded your video clip, access YouTube’s Video Manager and select Edit-Captions.

In the Captions pane, find the track called English: Machine Transcription. Click the Download button next to that track. YouTube will then save a file called captions.sbv to your desktop.

You will most probably need to edit the machine transcription file as YouTube does not do a very good job of it. Use Wordpad or MS Word to edit the file and once you are done save it in plain text format.

Click the Add New Captions or Transcript button. Click Choose File, select the captions.sbv file you edited and click Upload. Now the subtitles will be displayed coherently on YouTube (assuming that you did a good job of editing the sbv file).

Translating the Subtitles

There are two options that you can use to translate the subtitles. The easy way requires no work at all. After you upload the sbv file, users will see the CC (closed captioning) icon on your the video’s YouTube page. The Translate Captions option allows users to translate the subtitles into any of the 50+ languages that Google Translate offers. Since the sbv file you uploaded is good quality, the machine translation may be reasonable in some languages. (But if you don’t edit the sbv file and rely on the machine transcription, the Google Translate results may be terrible!)

There is a more painstaking way for you to prepare the subtitle translations: localize the sbv file you downloaded in each language and upload each file separately, indicating the language of the sbv file in the Language field.

Now, when users select the translated subtitles in YouTube, they will see a human translation of the subtitles.

Summary: The process I described here is very easy to do yourself, with the help of your translation team, and allows you to prepare your videos for an international audience. And it will probably help your international Video SEO efforts as well.

The future: In my blog post two years ago I predicted that automatic translation dubbing of videos will become available, making your movies speak in many different languages. But judging from how poorly the automatic transcription feature works, I would have to say that automatic dubbing into other languages is something that will happen in the distant future, if at all.

Related articles

• YouTube Improves Captions With New Formats, Languages, And More (techcrunch.com)
• YouTube enhances captions with new features, languages, formatting choices (9to5google.com)

I love football. And I love music. I am also quite fond of the Material Girl. But in the 2012 Superbowl? Madonna was just terrible.

The game itself was great and I thought that the better team won. But is was a nail-biting seesaw match which was decided in the game’s final moments.

But let’s talk about the halftime show. Recent years have brought us some amazing halftime shows by great rock and roll bands. The Rolling Stones and the Who were a bunch of guys in their 60s when they appeared in the Superbowl but both bands put on a great show. Everyone remembers U2′s appearance in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy when they showed all the names of the people who were killed in the terrorist attack. And who can forget Janet Jackson’s costume malfunction?

Janet Jackson

Which takes me to Madonna. Instead of letting her music speak for her, Madonna hid behind a mountain of kitschy pyrotechnic effects. She didn’t even perform! Instead she pre-recorded the songs and lip-synched them on stage. How phony is that? I don’t think that Madonna is too old. Like I said before, the Stones, McCartney and the Who were all much older than her when they performed at Superbowls. And Madonna can still dance like the devil. But isn’t being a musician about music, not just fancy lighting and stage affects? And shouldn’t a live music performance be just that? Live music by live performers? Madonna blew it, she failed to produce the goods. And it’s a shame because she had the biggest stage in the world to prove that she’s still got it.

Latin was the first real international language, much like the way English has adopted that role today. It was largely spread around Europe, North Africa, and also to a lesser extent into the Middle East, by the expanding Roman Empire. At the time it was used as a way to communicate for people living within the Roman Empire, and between the Empire and their allies. People were travelling to places they had never been before, and trade was flourishing between new territories, so a universal language to communicate with was essential.

Its spread into Europe had a massive influence on the languages that are now spoken in the majority of European countries. It was the basis for the Romance languages, of which the most widely spoken are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. For this reason many of the words spoken throughout the world today have their roots in Latin. But despite its wide influence throughout history, Latin is regarded as a dead language, even though it’s used more than you would believe.

Who still uses Latin?

You may be surprised to know just how much Latin is used in everyday language. Latin still has a dedicated following in religion, and is widely used within the Roman Catholic Church. Many clergymen for the Roman Catholic Church can speak Latin fluently. Official documents published by Vatican City are still written in Latin, as they were done in the days of the Roman Empire.
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Hi there. 2012 has started out very well at GTS and we are quite busy. The downside is that my blogging production has gone way down and this is only my second post this year. Sign of things to come? I hope so and I expect to pick up the writing pace soon.

I wanted to tell you a story that happened to us late last year. A client named ECETOC (European Centre for Ecotoxicology and Toxicology of Chemicals) ordered a website translation project from us in 5 languages. You can see the site on http://www.ecetoc.org. We delivered the translations and looked forward to a productive relationship with this very important client. But then we got this response from the client:

As you know, we have had issues since the outset with the Spanish texts and the feedback from each of the four independent Spanish reviewers is that it is not an accurate translation of the original and not representative of the meaning of the English version. They also said that a number of its phrases would simply not be used in Spain. This problem is causing an unreasonable amount of delay to everyone concerned and is putting us in jeopardy of not fulfilling the project on time. For these reasons it was decided to look for another provider for this language rather than to continue trying to correct your version (the scientists concerned are too busy anyway) and expect you to find another translator to finalise it.

This brings us to your recent invoice no. C-112-10/11-457. 
Please be so kind as to send a credit note to cancel this invoice and issue a new invoice without the Spanish translation option. This invoice will then be paid as soon as the validation on the staged sites has been completed for the 5 languages.

Four of the five languages were well received, but the Spanish version was rejected and the end-client refused to pay for it.

My question is, what would you do in this case? We tried hard to get the client to approve our Spanish version, but they emphatically refused. Since the Spanish translation was prepared by a partner translation company in Spain, are we liable to pay them? Can we simply not pay them and tell them “tough luck, you messed up?”

To be honest, that is what we did. We refused payment based on this client report. But our supplier is very upset, threatening to sue us and sending non-payment reports to some Internet sites.

I am interested in doing the right thing. On one hand the translation company did their job and handed in the translation. But on the other hand we did not get paid for the job they did and ended up losing a good account and future earnings. There are only losers here unfortunately.

Please let me know what you think. Should we pay the Spanish translation company anyway? Should they drop their claims? Should we compromise in some way? I would like to know what you think. Your answers may help us resolve this situation and make sure that we handle this in the right way.