Are you interested in contributing subtitles for Plum Village? Subtitles (also known as captions) are shown for Plum Village videos in a number of places online including:
- Within the Plum Village App for mobile, and the Web App
- On the main Plum Village website – plumvillage.org – in particular, in the Library section.
- On Plum Village App YouTube channel
- The official Plum Village YouTube channel.
You can volunteer to add subtitles to our videos, to make it easier for speakers of many languages to understand the teachings of Plum Village.
You do not need to be bi-lingual to help: contributing English subtitles is also very helpful. English subtitles help people who are not fluent in English, are deaf, or simply find it difficult to understand the accents of the Plum Village monastics. Creating English subtitles can also be helpful to the volunteers who are translating subtitles into other languages.
On this page we aim to provide all the instructions and resources you need to start to create subtitles.
Introduce yourself in our community forum!
Whilst anyone can work on and submit subtitles, we encourage you to introduce yourself in our subtitling community forum if you will be creating subtitles. This is also a place you can ask questions, get feedback and support other subtitling volunteers.
Joining as a subtitle contributor
Please join here to be able to contribute subtitles: http://web.plumvillage.app/contribute-subtitles
We will as a few questions about you, for example what languages you will be contributing in, so that we can support you and others in the community to contribute subtitles.
Finding a video to subtitle
So you would like to create subtitles for one of our videos? There are various ways to navigate to the associated subtitle page.
Tool to find videos that do not have subtitles
One of the best ways to find a video to subtitle is using this tool: https://web.plumvillage.app/subtitles/
You can use this to find a list of videos in your language that do not yet have subtitles. Then, you can pick one from the video to contribute subtitles for and press “Contribute subtitles”.
After clicking this link, you will see more details about subtitles for the video.
Contributing subtitles for a specific video
If there’s a particular video from the Plum Village app you would like to work on, first navigate to the video (in the same folder) on our web app. The web app can be accessed in the browser, and shows all the same content as the mobile app in a simplified form. The web app is available at: https://web.plumvillage.app/
Under most videos in the web app, you’ll see a link for subtitling / captioning:
Similarly, on many videos on our YouTube channel you will find a subtitling / captioning link in the video description:
Such links are also in place on the main Plum Village YouTube channel.
Sometimes, there is no subtitling link underneath a video, perhaps because it sits on a different YouTube channel. If you’d like to add subtitles for such a video, please contact us to request we add it.
Opening the subtitle editor
Once you navigated to the subtitling page for a video, there are two options:
- Add Language to add a subtitle track for a new language
- Edit on one of the languages in the list of existing subtitles.
Either of these will take you to the subtitle editor, which looks like this:
We are always looking to improve the editing experience, so if you have pain points or suggestions please share on our forum.
How to create subtitles
The basic process of adding subtitles is as follows: add each subtitle, typing what you hear and adjusting the timings. When you get to the end, review the video by playing it back and watching the subtitles, and then publish. If you tend to be comfortable navigating software, then you should find it is all very intuitive. It requires no prior experience of creating subtitles.
If you are translating subtitles into a new language, you do not need to adjust timings. You can just type the translations and keep the old timings.
We offer some guidelines on how to create high quality subtitles that are easy to read and flow naturally with the video. Please see our Dharma Talk Subtitling Guidelines.
Feedback
If there is anything you would like to know about creating subtitles that we didn’t explain on this page, please ask in our subtitling community forum.
We’ll try to support you with your questions, as well as add clarifications to this page for other volunteers.
I just want to tell you how much I appreciate this effort on your part. As someone who is hearing-impaired, I find that I am not using the app because I simply am not able to understand many of the speakers or I spend so much effort “trying” to understand that I end up missing the point the speaker is making. Thank you. I will try the app again.
Dear Bill,
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. We aspire to make the Plum Village App and the mindfulness resources as accessible as possible for everyone and we feel very lucky to have such a loving and contributing community all around the globe 🙏✨.
If you should ever have any inquiries or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us at hello@plumvillage.app 🤗.
With much appreciation,
The Plum Village App team
Thanks for your efforts for transcription and translations!
🙏☺️
Dear All,
These two links may be helpful for people who want instructions on how to use Amara:
https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/195345-create-captions-and-translations
https://support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/193571-watch-caption-translate-on-amara
Thank you,
Matthew