Lingua

In February 2012, EngageMedia went live with some exciting technology: in partnership with Universal Subtitles we’ve enabled online subtitling on all of EngageMedia’s videos. With our new Lingua Coordinator Seelan Palay, we’ve launched a Southeast Asia subtitling community for progressive video content, and you're invited.

Why and How
The 600 million people spread across Southeast Asia share a common set of challenges: climate change, human rights, freedom of expression, corruption and much more. With hundreds of regional languages, communication and collaboration can be difficult. Translation and subtitling could always help, but now it’s a whole lot easier.

Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), Universal Subtitles is an easy to use captioning and translation platform which is currently in use by organisations such as Al-Jazeera, TED and PBS NewsHour.

With the help of this tool, social justice and environmental campaigners across the region will be able to collaborate, share and make use of video works like never before.

Join Us
There are thousands of videos on EngageMedia and around the region that could be of use to social and environmental campaigners. We can’t subtitle them all, we want to work with you to make it happen. The system is easy, seriously. If you can write an email you can do this. In fact you don’t even have to know another language - transcribing the video in the language you know is a critical part of the process.

You can see a great example with the 'Love Letter to the Solider' video. Now in 6 languages, this translation will help enormously in communicating the issue of West Papua to a bigger audience. We hope to open up such videos to broader audiences. Now more than ever people can tell their own stories, for themselves.

Interested in participating? Join the team on Universal Subtitles!

Southeast Asia Subs Tour
Over the next 10 months Seelan will be travelling across Southeast Asia to do outreach and conduct workshops on Universal Subtitles and online video distribution tactics and strategies.

Seelan comes to us from Singapore, where he has a long and strong track record in promoting video activism as a tool for positive change.

He’ll be visiting Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore of course. First stop is a series of workshops in Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta in March. If you’re interested in participating, or even being a local host, please contact us.

The EngageMedia and Universal Subtitles teams

Other resources:
7 tips on Best Practices for Subtitling
How to use downloaded subtitle files on video players and editors

The Video Lingua project is supported by the Open Society Foundations (OSF).