Video Subtitles are Easy with dotSUB.com

Really. “Schooliness” retards growth.

Using dotSUB to Subtitle My Professional Development Videos for Korean Clients

A little behind-the-scenes glimpse at the bridge-building I’ve been doing to market my tutoring service, and at the same time to share another Web 2.0 offering with teeth: the video-subtitling site called dotSUB.

One of the biggest challenges I face on this limb is communicating with Korean parents who I am, and how I’m different from most of the “I’ve got a college degree and speak English, but have no teaching experience at all” English teachers in Korea. The parents, understandably skeptical about foreigners claiming to be teachers, have a million questions that bear on their decision to hire me. But they don’t speak English, and I don’t speak Korean, so my poor wife is caught in the crossfire playing two-way interpreter. Since she’s not a teacher-geek, it’s both hard on and unfair to her to shoulder her with explaining blogs, wikis, Skype, etc, to parents - or even to explain my background and experience as a teacher.

Enter the wonderful world of Web 2.0, and dotSUB particularly.

I’ve got so many movies on this space, on YouTube and Google Video and BlipTV and Archive.org, all explaining and demonstrating my background, character, skills and abilities, and all of them would serve admirably to put many parent questions to rest - if only they were in Korean.

Well, thanks to a full day’s work transcribing my own videos first, 3-second clip by 3-second clip on dotSUB, my wife is now plugging in her own Korean translation on the site under each time-stamped subtitle. Here are the results of the first one, the first half of a teacher-training video I made a few years ago at Shanghai American School (where Jeff Utecht and Jonathan Chambers first served me the Koolaid) about collaborative team-teaching in the mainstreamed ESL classroom. (I was the ESOL department head and teacher-trainer then. Ignore the Southern Baptist look; I must have been feeling nostalgic for Camp Joy.)

Cooler still, anybody at dotSUB can freely add a translation in their own language - which others can edit, wiki-like. All translated languages would auto-add to the drop-down menu in the media player’s “languages” bar. Very cool.

I’ll show you a few more things as they come. But what do you think, I wonder, about applications of this site for foreign language classrooms? Food for thought there….

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)