Video Translator’s platform provides a client with the ability to transcribe and translate content to/from a number of languages, as discussed here. Today, we will be using the video translation platform on a video from our friends at ChangePlan. We will do the following:

• Transcribe ChangePlan’s video using Australian English.
• Fix up spelling/grammar in our captions.
• Translate ChangePlan’s video from English -> Hebrew.

If you are looking to replicate this process, please note, after the translation step, it is highly recommended that you have a Hebrew qualified subject-matter expert finesse the captions. As always, use the AI to do the heavy lifting, and your own subject-matter experts to do the high value tasks.

The end result is shown below. Please note we are using captions, and not text overlays, to produce the below. In captions, we cannot control the details quite as well - in this example, had we used text overlays, we could have set the Hebrew text to be right-to-left, but in captions we have simply set to centred.

A quick viewing of the video will show that certain words, such as ChangePlan, are not translated. This is due to the fact that there is no translation of ChangePlan in Hebrew, as this is a proper noun (technically, a named entity, for the NLP folks). In such cases, it is expected that the asset owner user phonetic transliteration, literally spell the sounds out in Hebrew. The Video Translator platform can be used for transliteration, see here for more information.

Steps

1. Please direct your browser to videotranslator.ai, and then click on the Login button. Select myTemplate, or your preferred template, and create a new item. Note to follow this visual guide you will require a video component only in your template.
2. The original video was sourced from Gavin Wedell, the brains behind ChangePlan. You should totally check out his work if ChangePlan seems relevant to your use case.
3. Once in the new item, please upload the video, your screen should look similar to the below. In the below image, we have also scaled the size of the video.
   
4. Next, click on Actions -> Transcribe, and you should see something like the below. We have selected Australian English here, as we are in Sydney and the narration is in Australian English.
   
5. After triggering this action, the platform will close this item, and lock it. Once transcription is complete, this will automatically unlock. We recently made this change after a testing period, to handle transcriptions for long video’s. If you have a video longer than 15 minutes or so, it is advised to trigger the transcription, and then do something else for a while.
6. Open up the item, and have a look at the captions. The main task here, is to fix up the transcription. Practically, this means:
   1. Add grammar, in terms of comma's and full stops, in the correct places. The Speech-To-Text AI tries to use intonation to work this out and this does not work. People, when speaking, use intonation to denote importance. People do not use intonation in a ‘grammatically correct’ fashion, making the AI’s attempts interesting.
   2. Add capitalisation - it was important to capitalise ChangePlan, this is what triggers the AI to tread this as a named entity, and not attempt to translate ChangePlan as two different words.
   3. Remove capitalisation - in certain places, where the narration was important, the AI treated this as named entities. In this video, that meant the word 'agile' ended up incorrectly capitalised in various places. One must ensure these are removed, other wise the translation AI in the next step gets confused.
7. It took a few minutes to make the above changes. Once complete, click Action -> Translation, to trigger the video captions being translated. This is a pretty simple process, and can be seen in the image below.
   
8. The translation process will run in the background, and a few seconds later the Hebrew clone appears. Looking at the captions, we can see the below.
   
9. Please note, if you are looking for more options, including right to left text, you could use the Text Overlays, as opposed to Captions, which look something like below. It is also possible to change fonts, colour and opacity. In addition, add animated image overlays, or full video overlays, is also possible.
   
10. On completion, the original video looks like below. Note, the Hebrew text has not been cleaned up in the below, mostly so the process can be fully documented.

Conclusion

In this post we have covered how to translate your video from English to Hebrew.

The platform is currently in closed beta, while we work out bugs in the code. If you are interested in trying out our technology, please drop us an email at hello@videotranslator.ai.

Extra

Gavin Wedell, and the folks at ChangePlan, are good guys. Go on, give their product a look!

Please connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook for any comments, questions, or just to keep up to date with the work we do!

We are very grateful for your support!