Amara has announced a new platform that allows YouTube publishers to crowdsource subtitles and translation for their published videos.
Amara.org proved its own proof of concept in 2012 when the KONY 2012 video was translated into more than 20 languages and subtitled in less than 24 hours.
More than 300 users have already signed up to use the program.
To use the program YouTube account holders sync the platform with Amara and then invite viewers to add their own captions and translate videos.
Users can also offer edits to already created captions and translations, creating a type of Wikipedia style editing feature that relies on the crowd. Amara’s technology does not require users to worry much about formatting or the timing of words.
Not only will subtitled YouTube viewers do wonders for hearing-impaired users, it will also allow for better search engine optimization. By offering subtitles search engines will have more information at their disposal when it comes to indexing videos. Currently search engines rely on titles, short descriptions and tags.
While English is Amara’s most popular language for captioning the company is seeing swift increases for Spanish, Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese.
Will you be participating in the crowdsourced captioning and translation of YouTube videos?
