Ask HN: How to legally translate materials and make it accessible for many more? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to legally translate materials and make it accessible for many more?

14 pointspezo19194 comments

An urgent problem nowdays is that really few are trustworthy in the current media scene. Alternative (not mainstream) media, youtube/rumble/odysee etc have some really good content creators, but they all focus on a single language.

How can I/we make their work accessible for masses (for other languages)? I have no right to translate and post their material, but to make a translation available they have to do extra work each time. I doubt someone like Russel Brand with 5M subscribers is going to even recognize such an attempt in his email/comment section and it’s impossible for every translator candidate (who might do a great job but has limited time so can do 30mins of translation/month) to deal the with each content creator.

Any ideas?

The short answer is that you require permission to do it legally.

There's a long tradition of "fansub" media, though, for things like anime. It circulated on VHS long before youtube.

> trustworthy

A more general problem with translations: now you've got to trust the translator. There's lots of room for distortion and loss or change of nuance, whether deliberate or accidental.

There is a non-profit organisation that is providing tools to users to translate English content to other languages: https://translationcommons.org/academy/tools

Even the single language captions are mostly left to software and get it wrong often enough to be useless; youtube used to have a "community captioning" program, dont know what happened to that. At least on tiktok there's an etiquette of captioning the video yourself so it can be enjoyed on mute.

When I pirate a movie I can lookup corresponding .srt files to add captions in any language.

Maybe a browser extension that allows people to share caption tracks or alternate audio streams tagged to a video hash or url.

Maybe you could write a browser extension that injects your curated subtitle sources into video track tags?

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