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This relates somewhat to another thread on Youtube videos. At this point there is quite a lot of television material on Youtube for us learners, usually with English subtitles. However, this is only so good of a learning material. Over the years I’ve found that English subtitles are actually of very little use when it comes to improving your fluency.. You probably already have a gist of what is being said but need insight into the actual IRISH words being spoken, which, depending on dialect, speed of speech, and the specifics of your education, may be extremely difficult or impossible to decipher.
By far the most useful tools for me that have actually increased my listening and verbal abilities are having IRISH subtitles. Unfortunately these are very hard to find. There is a DVD of “Cré na Cille” which has them. There are a few episodes of “Grá faoi Ghlas” that have them. Aside from that and a few odd songs, this is a type of product that largely doesn’t exist. Is mór an trua é!
So I think it would be incredibly valuable to have a project whereby fluent people would work on transcribing Irish from videos such as the episodes on Youtube and have a site where these scripts can be posted. My ability to do this personally is somewhat spotty. Certain videos I can understand every word. Others I struggle to understand even the basic sense. If anyone is interested in pursuing this project seriously, what service I definitely can contribute is making subtitle files that will play along with a given movie if someone else did the transcription.
I really think that if we were to slowly build up a corpus of subtitles for Youtube videos (concentrating on certain series of shows, for instance, like “Turas Húcéira” or “CU Burn”) that would be immensely helpful to people especially those who don’t have ready access to native speakers. If this became big enough we could have our own web site for it. I don’t think there is any legality involved with posting transcriptions of speech from a movie, but I can look into this.
I honestly feel the English subtitles are close to counter productive. I speak a couple languages fluently and firmly believe that your brain will naturally take the easiest route to accomplish what it needs to do and it will trick you into thinking you understand things that you in fact did not understand in such a way that is difficult to detect.
What I mean by this is that as you are watching something like Turas Húicéara and reading the subtitles your brain processes the ideas and while you are only recognizing every 4th word your brain feels you are getting more out of what is being said than you in fact are. English subtitles become a crutch…
I am not a fluent Irish speaker but I am pretty technical and would be more than willing to help in this effort in any way that I can. I think it’s exceptionally worth while.
Exactly! I think the first step is to see if people are actually interested in getting things started. One obstacle is organization, another is motivation. The effort should ideally be concerted (i.e. all the transcribers should have some idea of what each other are working on, so they don’t double up their work and can maybe work). As for motivation, I think some people may not want to participate because they don’t feel they can do a whole episode. People should not be afraid to submit partial scripts that they can understand, as these can easily be assimilated into the larger file. For instance, I might have a transcription of episode 1 of Turas Húicéara coming up in the next day or so, but there will be a handful of blank spots where I was unable to decipher what he said. That is the job for someone else to go through and listen and see if they can fill in those blanks. And so forth.
At this point I think this thread should be used to have people “sign up” for an episode or video they wish to transcribe and then either post their transcription here or send it to someone (i.e. me) via PM and I can start organizing and making playable subtitle files for them.
I work with a group of Portuguese speakers who are doing translations of material in English. We use a Google docs spreadsheet to manage who is doing what and which pages. For example there might be 5 people working on a project. Each person will contact the Project Manager and say I’m going to translate pages 25 -35 and I will have them completed by the 23rd of February. Then when the 23rd comes if they add their translation tot he set the project manager marks it as complete. If after say the 25th they have not turned in their work the PM checks in and makes sure everything is ok. If something has come up and their pages need to be re-assigned the PM does that. This way nothing is skipped. The primary rule that we have is that if something important comes up and someone is not able to complete their work we in no way attempt to judge the person. Everyone keeps it firmly in mind that what we are doing is a side project and real life (kids, jobs, souses, etc) always comes first.
At the end a native speaker gives the translation a look over and makes any adjustments – the most common seems to be a word that can be translated into two words with very similar meaning. The editor picks one and we use that for consistency when it is needed. Just some ideas…
This sort of project would likely require less structure.
Edit:
Another possibility could be just compiling vocabulary lists to help learners as well. I’m doing this for Ainmhithe na hÉireann right now. My Irish isn’t good enough for doing a full transcription but doing this is certainly helping me build my vocabulary.Yeah vocab lists are helpful, especially at the learning stage. The aim of the project I have in mind is further into the fluency stage I think (not to say I am fluent or more fluent than you). What I have in mind would have tremendous implications for language preservation as well, i.e. some of these videos or recordings might feature older Gaeltacht speakers which, with time, will only be more difficult for the next generation to understand. Having as many transcripts for as many recordings as possible is a bit like the idea of tagging photos on a site like Facebook – you take away all doubt of who that is (in this case, what the sounds mean/meant). There are videos where I could watch it 100 times and I get no closer each time to understanding a particular phrase, even knowing the English translation, but can understand almost everything else in the same recording.
Are you familiar with Gaeilge-A? You might want to submit your idea to that list as well. If I could make a suggestion, though. It might be best to go to them with a small set of specific videos, say 3 – 5, and ask someone if they could pick one and transcribe it for you/us. I say us because I am certainly interested as well. Also, you might consider getting in touch with TG4 as they may have some transcriptions already. If there is anything I might be able to assist you in, just ask. Since this is your idea, I don’t want to step on your toes at all. But I’m on board with lending a hand in any way that I am capable.
As far as my technical background I’m a software engineer with experience in full stack web development: C#, ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript, SQL Server, HTML5, etc. (If any of that geek speak means anything to you! 🙂 ) So if you have any ideas that could use programming skills, so long as I can fit it into my already tight schedule, just let me know.
I have studied a few languages and agree that with the audio for the video in the foreign/studied language and the subtites in English/native language then my laziness kicks in and I don’t really learn anything or get any better with the new language. I was curious to see what people thought about having both the audio and subtitles both in the foreign/studied language. Does both seeing and hearing the language together help or hurt?
I think this depends on the level of the student vs. the level of the speech. For example, if the speech is at the level of the student but contains some new vocabulary words and sufficient context for the student to understand the meaning of the new words then full subtitles in the learned language would be of a negative value.
If, however, the speech is outside the level of the learner to where full sentences could be understood in writing but not necessarily in speech at a normal speed then subtitles can help bring the student up to the level of the speech through repetition. I think the problem is really with the self-taught. It’s uncommon that a self-taught learner has the knowledge of the learning process to be able to navigate these situations in the correct manner unless they have learned how to learn a language. The key factor here is that there needs to be enough repetition of the new phrases in the student’s own speech and through listening to the segment over and over until they have fully integrated it into their linguistic repertoire that the crutch get left behind eventually. If the student doesn’t do that then the time spent was nearly wasted.
Of course if the level of the speech is beyond both the written and aural abilities of the student then it’s not really appropriate for the student either way. As an “extra curricular” activity this can be fun. But students should be wary of spending too much time on things like that as they will take large chunk of time away from fully integrating the fundamentals into their own speech.
For me, there is no question that it’s a benefit. I feel at all levels, your brain is attempting to assimilate sound symbols along with their respective meaning. If you are just hearing sound without knowing what it means, you are not engaging in the most productive activity. You are learning to entrain the sounds into the part of your brain that will help you actually recognize and reproduce those sounds, but you are acquiring none of the meaning that you could potentially be acquiring.
The only point at which this wouldn’t benefit you is if you were so nearly fluent that you are able to listen to something and understand it completely, only potentially missing a word or two every now and then, and those you can tell what word is being said, you just don’t know the meaning. At any level below that where you can listen to audio and not even identify the words being used, the subtitles are immensely helpful. And when I say subtitles, I don’t mean “forced” subtitles (i.e. you can turn them off). The idea is not that you are obliged to view the text along with the audio, but that you always have access to the correct answer to the question “what did he/she just say?”
I think this is a great idea. The cartoons and other shows on tg4.ie have been a big help as I work on my listening skill. I’ve already transcribed a few episodes as a learning exercise, but in many cases there are a couple lines I can’t decipher. If a script repository can be set up, I’d be an eager contributor.
Could it be hosted here on daltai.com?
DnG might not want this due to potential copyright issues. It could cause problems potentially even if TG4 has no problem allowing them to host it, for example. Do you guys mind if I put something together just as a proof of concept?
This evening I was sitting down and watching the Walking Dead with my wife and I wrote this little script. This literally took me like an hour to get working so don’t judge the code and the web page is almost completely unstyled.
If you have a web site and want to use the code, feel free. This will allow any web site to take a .sub file and add captions to a video without actually being the owner of the video. If you would like I could create a database with a web service that would allow us to share the .sub files we create on any site and also have a main page from which people could view any of the videos we compile. If DnG would like to host this service, that is fine with me. If the developers in charge of the DnG site want to work with me to do something else, I’m open to that as well.
Well I’m impressed. I wouldn’t have guessed that was possible.
I’d like to see a repository for episode scripts where your subtitle facility was just one of the features. It would be great if one person could post their work on an episode, maybe another person could make corrections or fill in some missing words, and another person could turn the result into a .sub file, without us having to email drafts around. Could your script be made to work with videos from tg4.ie and potentially other sites? If not, I think it would be useful to have a place to store episode scripts in other than .sub format.
How about a data model similar to this?
VideoTitle
VideoDescription
VideoUrl (address of video)
SubFile
PostedBy
Transcript
Comments []Then people who have their own sites or blogs could just set up the JavaScript I created to display the video and the subtitles similar to my example.
Is there anything else we might need in the data model? PostedBy would be the user who created the transcript or subtitle file. I just want to point out, as well, if you can create a transcript there is no reason that you cannot create a subtitle file using a site like captiontube. http://captiontube.appspot.com/
I went ahead and got some free hosting. I’ll set up a better demo as time permits.
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