Participatory Culture Foundation

Hi, Safetex: see the rewording of the first post of Removing subtitles or videos:

Updated 4/1/13

Removing Subtitles

If you created subtitles and would like to remove them, please ensure that you're not destroying anyone else's work (check the revisions tab – if there are any other usernames listed, we urge you to NOT remove your work). We also discourage you from removing your subtitles if there additional languages on the video, because you can interfere with other people's work if they translated from your subtitles. Once you've confirmed that you won't be destroying another user's work, go to your subtitles' language page and open the subtitle editor – blank out each line in the editor and save your progress. Your subtitles will be removed from the list of languages in the sidebar of the video page. (...)

It doesn't work, and the part about removing videos is worse. I've vainly tried to hint  that this Poisson d'Avril commence à cogner ferme. Autant siffler dans un violon.

So what I did was I "translated your French subtitles into French". I know, they look silly in a way. But say, someone wants to translate them into another language, it'll be easier this way. Or you could use them to produce an audio description for the blind in French via text-to-speech.

 

Yes,,  I'm Claude Almansi. I changed by nick to the present one here, because no matter what rhetorical precautions I took, some people mistook me for Amara staff.

One advantage of CC subtitles is that they are off-switchable. But it's such a pity Amara scrapped the possibility to have several subtitle sets for one language. It used to have it, when it was called "Universal Subtitles", at least in the beginning. So you could have one set for translation where you repeated what is written in the video, and one set for people who need original captions.
Of course, as they both had the same language name, you'd have to try them to know which was which, but that was a minor inconvenient.   YouTube has solved that elegantly by letting us add labels to the language name.
Amara made intensive use of these YouTube labels during the brief time when the Amara Google team   was meant to translate  "all Google related videos" : see the subs of "Project Glass: Live Demo At Google I/O" on YT.  I wish they'd offer us again the possibility to have more than one subtitle tracks for one language, and to label them.