We are very proud to launch a major new Amara.org feature– free crowd subtitling for every personal YouTube user! Want to make your videos accessible to people around the world who speak a different language? Want deaf and hard of hearing users to be able to watch? Just connect your YouTube account to Amara and invite your viewers to help. Whenever subtitles get created, they will be synced directly to your YouTube channel. It takes about 10 seconds to connect your YouTube account.

Unless you speak every language in the world, you need your viewers help to translate the video in their language and help get you more viewers. Any moderately popular YouTube video will get lots of viewer subtitling help.

Amara’s volunteer community is getting big– some Khan Academy videos on Amara are translated into more than 40 languages! Want to watch Gangam Style in Esperanto? Amara has it. Twitter uses Amara to subtitle their product launch videos (click the ‘cc’ in the player), Netflix uses Amara to subtitle movies and tv shows, and TED Talks has more than 11,000 volunteers in their Amara translation community. If you post any videos on YouTube, this is how you can help the world to watch!

Connect your YouTube channel to Amara right here.

Companies and organizations: interested in taking your YouTube Channel global? Learn more and contact us.

Our press release is here.

Over the past few months, we’ve been growing very fast. It’s been exciting: more videos, more subtitles, more volunteers. We’ve been seeing an increase in remarkable viral moments, like the (controversial) KONY 2012 video being translated into 37 languages on our platform in less than a week.

And we’re hearing from more and more video publishers that want to launch volunteer communities, as PBS Newshour recently did (you can join their team here!).

For a few important reasons, ‘Universal Subtitles’ is no longer the best name for us. As our community grows and our platform expands, we need a name that’s less specific (what if someday we add functionality that’s not just for subtitles?) and that really captures the sense of community that we’re hoping to build– as a non-profit with a social mission, we are certainly not a typical web startup. Changing a name is hard, but we’ve found a new name that feels right.

And that new name… is Amara. The word ‘Amara’ means several things– it’s a form of the Spanish verb amar, ‘to love’ and it means ‘eternal’ in Sanskrit. We like these meanings and others.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be making the biggest announcements we’ve ever had, and with those, what started as Universal Subtitles will be transitioning to the name Amara. Our URL won’t change at first — it’s a big project that we want to undertake carefully — but ‘Amara’ will start to replace ‘Universal Subtitles’ throughout our site and in our announcements.

We’re encouraged by the community developing around Amara. If you’re excited by the idea of making video accessible to those who are hard of hearing and to audiences around the world in any language, just add a video URL to start subtitling or translating now.

Today we were very proud to launch the PBS NewsHour translation team, part of their Open Election 2012 project.

The first video we’re working on together is the State of the Union speech– help us translate it!

Translate the State of the Union Here

(
{“video_url”: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD_wUNb0cw8″}
)

Universal Subtitles is a collaborative and award-winning platform for subtitling and translating online video. We’ve created an elegant subtitling tool that you can embed into any webpage, for almost any video. And we’re building an online community to subtitle and translate the world’s most popular and significant videos.

We’re looking for a web developer who is either (or both):

1) An experienced Django developer (preferred) or…

2) An experienced developer of web applications with strong fundamentals and a track record of quickly learning new frameworks.

If you’re awesome and you’re excited about our project, we want to talk to you. Though the need we have right now is for someone who can rapidly build user facing features on our subtitle collaboration site, and we think knowing Django inside out will help.

The project is free and open source, available under the AGPL license, and our organization is a 501(c)3 non-profit. Our supporters include Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation. And our tool has been used by the New York Times in their Egypt coverage and by Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) in their ongoing effort to translate their award-winning educational videos.

This is an ideal gig for someone who wants to build software to create social change. You’ll be building features to help an active and growing community do world changing work, as well as a a free, open source JavaScript/HTML5 widget that can go head to head with any competing Flash, iOS, or desktop subtitling app.

Things that make you an even stronger candidate, from our point of view:

* Ability to make reasonable UI/UX decisions on the fly as you code
* Good communication skills for working with developers in other organizations (partners, clients)
* Project management experience

To apply, send a resume (txt or rtf) to jobs@pculture.org

I almost can’t believe it, but Universal Subtitles has won three separate awards in the past 4 months! I am just so proud of our team, especially since some of the best stuff that we’re working on hasn’t even been released yet (January is going to be very exciting).

I’m also very pleased that each award honors Universal Subtitles for slightly different reasons — equality, accessibility, and intercultural innovation. It speaks to our hope that by making subtitling common instead of rare, we will all benefit, each in different ways.

 

2011 Tech Award for Advancing Equality

 

FCC Award for Advancement in Accessibility

 

Intercultural Innovation Award