CivieBlog

I’ve just been looking at a really excellent Beta site called Dot Sub

The site is an interesting adaptation of the Youtube model. People can upload videos (up to 300Mb) and share them among limited groups or with everyone.

What’s really interesting though about Dot Sub is that it is aimed at subtitling and translation for people with hearing problems. The video tool allows you to input subtitles beneath the clip. These can either be translations or transcriptions. Users can also upload clips for others to translate for them. The site isn’t limited to English only and so the translations or transcriptions for the subtitles and film clips could be in any language.

This is really a marvelous idea and has bags of potential for language teaching and development.

Here’s a few ideas off the top of my head.

• Upload a film clip (in English) and ask students to translate or transcribe it. They can then compare with your own translation / transcription.
• Transcribe a clip with some errors and see if they can spot / correct them.
• Ask students to independently translate a clip of a poem and then compare their different versions.
• Ask students to create their own video clips (If students have their own cameras or webcams) upload them and then get another member of the class to transcribe it.
• They could just browse and translate or transcribe one of the existing videos.
• Transcribe in what people are thinking as opposed to what they are saying
  

Here’s a video produced by the site with a very fast explanation of how it all works.


The site is free and registration is quite quick. So check it out at: http://www.dotsub.com
By all means let me know what you think and post a comment here.

Best
Nik