Sub-Titling: In Case You Were Wondering

You may have noticed in the past couple of years that Fousesquawk has been posting a number of news reports out of Europe with English sub-titles. You would also notice that the articles are prefaced with a hat tip to other blogs, specifically Gates of Vienna and Vlad Tepes. Actual translation is performed by various people including Fousesquawk. Perhaps, it is time for an explanation.

Both of the above blogs (GoV and VT) are largely concerned with events in Europe surrounding the Islamic invasion with all of its resulting crime, terrorism and general all-around hatred especially towards Jews. Most of their translation capability was concentrated on German and French. They also have volunteers who translate from other European languages.

Sometime ago, GoV and VT put out a call for an Italian translator to deal with the issues in Italy. Having lived five years in Italy, I volunteered and ever since then, I have worked in collaboration with the above two blogs. I have also translated videos from Spain. In addition, my level of proficiency in Swedish and Dutch allows me to translate written articles, but I am not yet to the level where I could effectively do video sub-titles. (I am working on that, however.)

What we do is this: In my case, GoV and/or VT will send me an Italian or Spanish video and have me preview it for a recommendation as to whether we want to sub-title it. If we decide to go ahead, VT (the tech whiz) will convert the video so that I can do the translation on Aegissub (sub-titling software). I then do the translation, and from there, editing is done by GoV, followed by VT actually putting in the sub-titles and posting the final product. All three of us will then post the video on our respective blogs.

In addition, I will occasionally scour  Swedish and Dutch news sites for appropriate articles to translate from the written text.

We all feel that this is an important endeavor since it is vital that Americans fully understand what is going on in Europe without having to depend on the American media or English-language web sites. What is happening now in Europe is a preview of what is coming to our own shores.