For one of my Master’s classes, I got the opportunity to set up a cultural event together with some of my fellow students. We got to work together with people from Europeana in the framework of their Europeana XX: Century of Change project, which focuses on audiovisual heritage footage from the 20th century.
The event we helped create is a subtitling marathon, or subtitle-a-thon for short. Four of these subtitle-a-thons are already planned to be held later this year, with more to come.
A subtitle-a-thon is a crowdsourcing event which allows you to create and add subtitles to archival audiovisual content. You can contribute to making this content more accessible to multilingual audiences and more widely available.
During the events, people with different language skills work together toward a common goal: to create and add subtitles to archival media fragments coming from various European collections. During the events, participants will have the opportunity to use specialized technology to subtitle the content.
The subtitle-a-thons are open for every European citizen with an interest in history and culture.
Each participant of an event will be rewarded with a certificate of participation. Furthermore, the top 3 contributors to each event, based on the amount and quality of submitted subtitles, will win an online gift card.
Recently, we held a short trial subtitle-a-thon together with some of the partners of the Europeana XX project, as a stress test for the website and the subtitle editor we helped create. Their feedback was overall a positive one, with some expected bugs to be worked out still. Either way, it was an amazing learning experience and personally I can’t wait to join one of the subtitle-a-thons as a translator next time!
The first public marathon, the Warsaw Subtitle-a-thon, will take place on Saturday, June 12th at 11.00 CET.
For more info on this and other events, click here. Please note that the website is still under construction and will be added upon during the following weeks!
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Warsaw Subtitle-a-thon
Join us for the Europeana XX: Subtitle-a-thon challenge in Warsaw and share with us your language and subtitling skills to Subtitle the Past, Translate for the Future.
My Travel and Language Experience 