The Frugal Filmmaker now in Other Languages

Always pondering over how I can increase the reach of my ideas, I recently came across an idea that should have been obvious a long time ago. With a growing international audience for this information, why am I not translating everything into other languages? In the past, the answer would have been "I don't have those kind of resources", but now there are many forms of automatic translation that can easily be integrated into your blog and YouTube uploads.

The first thing I tried was Google's translation widget that you can incorporate into any Blogger blog. It was okay, but any one who doesn't speak English maybe wouldn't know what it was when they saw it. That was a problem, as was when it was used, it would strip all the page formatting. After a quick search (on Google ironically), I found GTranslate which provides HTML code easily integrated into your blog, no matter what platform. It does the same thing (a dropdown menu that lets you pick another language), but has a graphic of international flags (which tips off the reader) and keeps the formatting of what it translates. Nice.

The second thing I tried was captioning on YouTube. I understand the importance of captioning to the hearing impaired (which is another audience you can reach), but considering you had to upload a script, I wasn't very enthused. I ad lib most of my shows, so creating a script to upload meant transcribing--not interested, thank you.

Now, you can go into your settings and click on "captions" which lets YouTube create a script from your audio and generate captions for you. Of course it's riddled with typos, buy you can download the script, make corrections, and re-upload. Once captions are activated, you can click on the "CC" button on the bottom of the playback window and change the captions to another languages. Perfect!

So this is what I've done. The GTranslator is active on my blog and I've turned captioning on every one of my videos.  Almost all are still in the messed-up initial translation (except one), but it's a start. I now have the Herculean task of fixing most of them (I'm going to leave the Recap vids the way they are and tweak everything else), which will take awhile.

I think this is an important step. Now anyone speaking a language other than English can take part in learning about micro-budget film, which may have been out of their reach previously. It's exciting to reach more viewers, but even more exciting that the goal of reaching a global audience (something the internet always promises) is that much closer to reality.