First Ever Crowd Subtitles App for YouTube Launched by Amara.org

Enables YouTube channels to invite their viewers to translate videos into dozens of languages for global distribution. Examples below.

NEW YORK, NY – Crowd-subtitling platform Amara.org is today launching a free service that allows any personal YouTube creator to invite viewers to subtitle their videos and sync the subtitles to their YouTube account. This is the first-ever subtitle crowdsourcing option available for free to YouTube users, letting them invite viewers to translate their videos into dozens of languages. Amara is also launching a professional version of the feature for companies and organizations that want to take their channel global.

Amara.org is an award-winning subtitle crowdsourcing platform, a ‘Wikipedia for subtitles’, with tens of thousands of volunteers working to caption and translate web videos from around the world. Amara’s customers include Netflix, Twitter, TED Talks, Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, and Google use Amara’s Enterprise services to build their own dedicated subtitling communities, notifying members each time a new video is posted. For example, when Twitter launched its new photo filters feature last month, Twitter users translated the promo video into 20 languages in just two days.

The new YouTube app launched today gives any YouTube user a crowdsourced translation and captioning system. “Our goal is to make every video on the web accessible around the world,” said Dean Jansen, co-founder of Amara, “The only way to get millions of videos subtitled is if the viewers are invited to help. By making crowd subtitling available for any YouTube creator, we’re allowing them to reach more viewers in more languages, improve their SEO, and enable anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy their videos.”

For YouTube users, the functionality is simple. They visit Amara.org, connect their YouTube channel, and any videos in their YouTube channel will include a link inviting users to help subtitle. When subtitles are created by a user, for example a Spanish translation, they will be synced automatically back to the YouTube account and will be available on any site in which the video is embedded.

“The only way to get a video translated into the world’s languages is to invite the world’s viewers to help. No YouTube creator speaks every language and automated transcription and translation is still not high enough quality to understand the content of a video. But viewers watching from around the world are excited to help others watch,” said Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of Amara. Last year, the KONY 2012 video was translated on Amara.org into over 20 languages in just one day. “Now any popular video on YouTube can get high quality translations almost immediately. When a video goes viral, it can get huge everywhere at once.“

“The Internet has the power to bring people together across cultures, to broaden our understanding of each other and that has cultural, political, and personal consequences,” continued Reville. “But language barriers create informal silos that separate us. We’re taking video, the most popular medium in the world, and using it to start chipping away at those silos, making the conversation more global.”

To get started, users can visit Amara.org and sync their YouTube Channel in seconds. Companies can visit this site to take their channel global.

Examples of Amara.org in action:

TED Ed YouTube video with 26 translations created on Amara.

Twitter Photo FIlters YouTube video with 21 translations created on Amara.

TED Talks translator community.

Udacity translator community.

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About Amara

With customers such as, Netflix, Twitter, PBS, TED Talks, Udacity, and Coursera, Amara gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. Amara’s revolutionary crowdsourcing approach offers a robust API that allows companies to use the platform for internal collaboration as well as allowing individual customers to translate video content. Backed by a million dollars in funding from the Knight Foundation and Mozilla, Amara has received awards from the Federal Communications Commission, the United Nations and TechAwards. For more information, visit Amara.org and follow @AmaraSubs on Twitter.

Media Contact:
Josh Segall
joshua.segall@amara.org
(334) 328-9184