Symposium videos: call for volunteers

Hi, iXMLers,

For the iXML Symposium, I volunteered to sort out editing, transcribing, and subtitling the videos of the presentations before we put them online. Unforrtunately, my laptop died right after the Symposium, so the chunk of free time I'd set aside for doing most of this work was lost to Apple Support being unusually incompetent, leaving me without my usual machine for a month.

In any case, I'm working on getting the videos finished as often as I can, amidst various other unavoidable commitments and hospital visits. However, it's a bit of an involved process, and it's not something you can do (well) for extended periods of time, so the work is going slowly.

There are still nine videos left to work on (you'll be glad to know that the round-table discussion is done; that was probably the most difficult one!). I'm aware that there's a desire to get them online very soon, so if anyone else has time and access to video subtitling software, and is willing to take on one or more of the remaining presentations, I'd be more than happy to hand them over. Once subtitles are done, I'll add title screens etc. to all of the videos so that they're consistent.

The job involves:
	- transcribing the talk (I'm doing this with standard text-to-speech; no AI tools please);
	- listening through and correcting the transcription, particularly:
		- technical terms and proper nouns - these all need particular attention because text-to-speech often struggles with them (I generally check against the presenter's slides or check with the presenter if necessary);
		- normalizing things like repetitions of words ("It's on the... the... the second slide" is reduced to "It's on the second slide"), just to reduce the cognitive burden of reading the subtitles;
		- making sure that sentence breaks are in the right places and adding in any necessary punctuation;
		- adding in line breaks between speakers during Q&A sessions;
	- adding the corrected subtitle track to the video and making sure that it's readable without covering up too much of the screen - I've been using black text on a semi-transparent white background at the bottom of the screen
	- exporting the video in mp4 format  with the subtitles.

I've been using Adobe Premiere to do the work so far, but it doesn't matter what software you want to use as long as we end up with fully corrected subtitles that look fairly consistent.

If you are able to volunteer, let me know and I'll get one of the video files to you.

Thanks in advance!

BTW

___________________________________________________ 
Dr. Bethan Tovey-Walsh 

linguacelta.com

Golygydd | Editor geirfan.cymru

Croeso i chi ysgrifennu ataf yn y Gymraeg.

Received on Thursday, 9 July 2026 14:30:38 UTC