LessigArchitecture_RR_EN

flat =English version of Roberta Ranzani's account of subtitling Lawrence Lessig's The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge=
 * Roberta:** This was my first discovery of a video with such an important content, and so long (50 minutes). I was able to use the synchronized transcript made by CA, so I just had to translate it line by line, as the Universal Subtitles interface invites us to do. Recently, I noted that some functions have improved since this subtitling: for instance, if a user does nothing for some minutes, the software automatically saves his/her work and sends a confirmation message. Whereas 2 months ago, it was not clear if this automatic saving had happened or not. This can be useful, for instance, when you have to pause for any reason, or when you look things up in a dictionary, or if your browser crashes. However, there is still a design problem: the box for inserting the text is needlessly small, which is not user-friendly. But let's remember that this is a recent program, still in beta.

Learning about themes that I knew, but not deeply enough to deal with them off-handedly, required a greater commitment. The importance of these themes made me feel - beyond the enthusiasm for their diffusion - a kind of answerability in conveying them as accurately as possible. Copyright, copyright history, accessibility and its limits, free licenses - in 50 minutes, Lessig touched so many subjects that required researches and also consulting Nicola Lucchi, who teaches Information and Communication Law at Università di Ferrara for an informed opinion on the legal aspects of the translation. Fortunately, Lessig is also a master of communication: the seeming "lightness" (as defined by Calvino) of his famous presentation style, as well as his use of a simple and immediate vocabulary, made translating him a pleasant experience. His many examples and references to anecdotes and citations (as John Philip Sousa's "We will not have a vocal chord left") illustrating the resistance met by all technological innovations throughout history since writing was invented ( see Walter J. Ong, 1982. //Orality and Literacy//. London. Methuen) - these rhetorical devices are impressively efficient towards arousing listeners' interest in apparently heavy topics.

As for me, having to do research in order to avoid inaccuracies or distortions of what others mean has also been a kind of learning by doing. If I had only passively viewed a documentary on TV, I would probably not have delved as deeply in the subject. Then there is another aspect I wish to refer. It emerged as I was writing the Italian subtitles. Universal Subs enables you to insert automatic translations by Google Translate with a mere click for all subtitles that have not yet been translated. You can even do that when the translation of subtitles was started by someone else.



Well, I tried this option after having translated ca 20 subtitles: all the remaining empty fields were diligently filled, but it was not a good idea. In fact, I had to correct them one by one, word by word, which took me more time than if I had done the translation from scratch. Some may think I am a reactionary like John-Philip Sousa. Granted, computational linguistics and natural language processing are getting more and more accurate, and their applications are now available to anyone. However, I believe that Google's automatic translation is not yet able to render a text satisfyingly: it is too literal, maybe because it is based on statistics, and it cannot catch nuances. I suspect that this is particularly true for translations from English into Italian. Many of these issues will probably be overcome within a couple of years, but for the time being, automated translation is alright if used to get the general meaning of a text or website, not to translate it efficiently. The point is, in my opinion, that it does not make much sense to offer automatically translated subtitles in a social context. You might just as well have the software of the hosting platform offer subtitles in all main languages as soon as the video is published (and the concept of main language itself is arguable). As to the merely "social" aspect of deciding to work on something that takes time and resources (also cognitive and emotional resources), for the sole compensation of knowing that this will enable others to use it, such a commitment only works when you are strongly motivated by an interest in the argument - whatever it might be - and by a faith in knowledge sharing. Of course, seeing that other volunteers are doing the same work in their own language, almost simultaneously, is in itself a gratifying element in this special kind of crowdsourcing (//The Architecture of Access to Knowledge// has been subtitled in 7 different languages - including an attempt in Esperanto - all based on Claude's original transcript) particularly, I suppose, for the first transcriber of the original.

=Back to= Subtitling Lawrence Lessig's "The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge". =Short URL= Shorter URL for this page: http://bit.ly/LessigArchitecture