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Crowdfunding / Media / Small businesses

Kickstarter’s new video subtitles could mean business for local translators

The new captioning feature is meant to make project videos more accessible to more people — “whatever their language, and whatever their hearing level,” Kickstarter says. Two Brooklyn translators are pumped.

A still from the Kickstarter video announcing closed captioning. (Screenshot)

In order to expand Kickstarter’s reach across the globe and let more people participate in projects, the crowdfunding leader announced Monday that captioning is now enabled on all videos hosted on the site.
The video on the announcement page shows seven languages that captions can be seen in. A spokesperson confirmed that those are the languages enabled so far. Users still need to provide their own translation, which could be a business opportunity for freelance translators out there.
“I think adding the captions is very important,” Tim Giardina, owner of Bay Ridge’s Metro Audio & Video, told us over the phone Tuesday. He said his company would definitely be interested in working with Kickstarter videos. He also owns Metro Captions, a company focused on translation and closed captioning.
Vigdis Eriksen, owner of Brooklyn Heights’ Eriksen Translation agreed, and the fact that these would be small quick, jobs on fairly short videos didn’t worry her. “We like working with startups and we’d love to work with more tech companies in Downtown Brooklyn,” she said. Eriksen provides translations in over 100 languages.
One user experience issue that the first commenter pointed out: The controls for the video cover the captions, until that bar goes away. This is not exclusive to Kickstarter. Users can’t make the controls go away, either. It disappears with a timer that seems to restart if the viewer mouses over the video.
All of the people featured in the video work at Kickstarter, according to a company spokesperson. They speak many languages.

Companies: Kickstarter
Series: Brooklyn
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