Participatory Culture Foundation

Darren, after consulting with Verone, we've decided to try yet again to explain, though over 2 months have now gone by since Amara removed the possibility to copypaste a plain transcript, a possibility you still list in the FAQ here, btw.: see the version I just archived in http://www.webcitation.org/6A5MViJFU.

Darren, volunteer subtitlers want to subtitle, not to have to learn how to format transcripts as UTF-encoded .txt files because over 2 months ago, Amara developers decided of their own bat to deprive them of the possibility to copypaste a plain transcript. They want the copypaste solution back. That's the only solution compatible with Amara's claim to be an online subtitling platform, let alone "The easiest way to caption and translate any video".  Moreover, you can't create and upload a .txt file if you have to use a public computer (in a cybercafé, community centre, library) because you don't have a connection of your own, because you can't save stuff on public computers.

Users have been deprived of this copypaste option - and asking to have it back - for over 2 months now. Let developers restore it now. "...working to prioritize [these issues] in future releases to Amara" is just not good enough.

Hello Claude and Verone, 

Thank you for bringing up these points. The reason why special characters get mixed up or go missing on regular .txt files is why we are encouraging users to use the UTF-8 encoding, since it is very useful to preserve special characters used in many different languages.  I have updated the solutions topic to reflect the changes in our system: it no longer includes the instructions to copy and paste text so users don't get confused and it also includes the short instructions on how to save with UTF-8 encoding on notepad.  
   
http://pculture.freshdesk.com/solution/articles/8149-how-do-i-upload-subtitles-and-transcripts-

We understand your desire to reinstate the copy and paste field for transcripts, while that gets sorted out, we'd really like to help those who can't use the upload function.
  
I have also used public computers in the past and understand the limitations there are with saving files and also with working offline. It would help us tremendously if you could provide us with some specific use cases as to why or when translators or transcribers can't upload so that we can come up with an interim solution while the copy paste capability issue is resolved. 

How were these users getting their txt files to copy paste into Amara when it was enabled? If they were using a USB drive, could they upload the file directly from it?  If they were using a file sent to their email address, could they use the internet connection to send the file to email to upload it to Amara?  It would be quite useful to know details of what kinds of systems are making it hard for them to use our software so we can in the future take these limitations into account. 

Thanks again for continuing to care about improving Amara.

HI, Jules

Thanks for your reply and for the UTF-8 tuts to cover temporarily the issue. When copypaste was possible, users would e.g. copy an existing online transcript and slap it in the copypasting box, then make the empty lines to roughly separate the unsync'd subs in the result - I mean just as you can do with http://subtitle-horse.com, except that SH also allows you to just use line-breaks without empty lines to do that. Then the software produced the unsync'd subs, with no encoding issues, as it does with SH.

So of course, people  - if they can download the result to a computer -  could also use SH to get something encoded in UTF-8 to reuse in Amara. Or they could use Piratepad, actually: http://piratepad.eu/FPBy7NcsIZ exported as plain text .txt was correctly UTF-8 encoded, and that's what I used in http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/6TQ6KOZvQjVc/fr/374242. But having to use an external software - be it desktop or online - is impractical, and anyway, you need to be able to save on a computer, as you recognized.

Hi Claude and Verone,

Thanks for the use-case and clarification, and the pirate pad option is a great tip, I'll add it to the solutions as well.   

Thank you for understanding about the disabling of the paste transcript option, we are working on improving the interface for all users and hopefully it will be back soon. In the meantime, while it won't be as easy as the option to copy and paste the entire lyrics, users who can't save a .txt file on the computer or USB drive so they can upload it, always have the option to copy and paste the lyrics line by line into the widget. While not ideal, and more time-consuming, it will enable them to work with existing content without having to save a text file.

Best,

Jules

Actually, now YouTube offers the possibility not only to copypaste a transcript, but to write it unsynced in the admin interface of the video - and then the YouTube software syncs it.

Provided that their very simple instructions for formatting transcripts are followed, the result is really quite good. Moreover, I linked to the English version of those instructions, but they are also available in tens of other languages by changing the language in the droplist at the bottom of the page.

Of course, you have to be the video uploader to use that feature. But in some cases, you might get permission from the original uploader to reupload it for subtitling. Worth a shot, anyway.