We are excited to tell you about a new feature available for our foreign language classes. We now have same language captioning available through Kaltura MediaSpace for 11 of the 13 non-English languages taught at KSU. Those languages include Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. We’ve created here a brief video resource to explain and to show you how to begin using it.
A few important notes:
- This is NOT translation: Captions are all “same as source.” If your audio is in Japanese, running the Japanese caption option will produce Japanese captions for the Japanese content.
- A caption file cannot include two languages: If your video contains English and Portuguese, then running the Portuguese captions will caption the Portuguese content as Portuguese and attempt to caption the English content as Portuguese. We do have a workaround for videos with two languages.
- You CAN run two caption requests on a single video: This sample French language video is a great example of how it might be used. Our colleague ran a French language caption request for the French and an English for the English. She then edited each caption file so that when the speaker was speaking French, the English captions tell the viewer to switch to another caption file, and vice versa. To view the captions click the “CC” icon and choose the language to view.
- This is only available in the “Machine” caption option: Auto-generated captions are generally not as accurate as “Human” or “Professional” captioning. However, in our initial tests, we did find that the captions were 85% or higher in accuracy. We are investigating the possibility of also getting a human captioning option.
If you have questions or would like to learn more, please contact dli@kennesaw.edu or dli.accessibility@kennesaw.edu.
