translation

Ever wish you could press a button and have your Google Adwords campaign or your banner ad displays all instantly translated into, say, Polish? I do. In the not-so-new Global Economy, it seems like localization of media and advertising should be a simple dashboard feature, not an arduous linguistic odyssey. For Adwords users, Google offers a Translation toolkit which runs on their impressive super-collider translation engine. The problem is that machine translation, even with Googliest algorithms, ends up looking like a super-collision, spitting out a stilted version of the original--comprehensible perhaps, but awkward, like cousin Balki on "Perfect Strangers".

Here at Spoolcentral we have crowdsourced our fair share of video transcription, translation and subtitling and it's not as simple as it looks. Our JobSpooler platform automatically divides video and audio media into chunks for assignment distribution to our crowd of Spoolsmiths. So far, so good. However, we've been looking at ways of integrating all the tools needed for transcribing and subtitling all in one place (automated timestamping, line-length control, error correction, etc.).