DotSUB: Any Video, Any Language

dotSUB wants to crowdsource the translation of video, from any language, to any language.

dotSUB is a browser based tool enabling subtitling of videos on the web into and from any language. There is nothing to buy and nothing to download. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders of dotSUB created a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, “wiki” type environment. The dotSUB tool gives anyone the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the bottom of the video.

The idea of dotSUB was born in early 2004 after viewing the film “Fahrenheit 911.” Michael Smolens, Founder and CEO of dotSUB, realized that if one documentary film in English might have an impact on a very close US Presidential election, what would happen if all independent and documentary films, television programming and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages – what a powerful impact on the world that would be!

The goal was to create a tool that was as simple to use as the Google search bar, with no downloads, that could engage the power, methodologies and thinking of open source, wikipedia, social networking, creative commons and web2.0 user involvement to substantially remove language and cost as a barrier to cross-cultural communication using video.

I really like dotSub’s UI. It’s simple and doesn’t muddle utility with a bunch of ‘feature-creep’. It’s easy enough to begin translating and even easier to begin watching with subtitles in your language of choice. Once translations are complete, the emedable video displays information about what languages the video is available in. The first video I checked out was already streaming in Luo, English, French and Swahili.

I like to describe dotSub as ‘the Maneno of video’. Maneno is a blog platform that does similar translations for text. All we’re missing now is an application that provides aural translations and we’re one step closer to completely unified communication on the web!