I'm probably slow on the uptake, but I just realized that YouTube has a feature where video viewers can voluntarily help out by adding captions and translations to my videos.
In the never-ending quest to teach people machine knitting and make this hobby more fun and productive as well, I've been painfully aware of had badly my videos need captioning (for the hearing-impaired and for the rest of us, as well, who need to see exactly what was said) as well as translations in other languages. I have captioned some videos, simplifying what I said to make the captions more readable (I do chatter on), but there are plenty of videos that are not captioned.
YouTube has a tool to caption videos but it doesn't understand the knitting jargon. You get truly weird captions. They can be funny, but they aren't very useful when you're trying to follow the instructions.
I have lots of requests for translations, especially into Spanish, German, French and Italian. I put emails in other languages into Google Translate and I see, once again, that someone needs this video in another language. I don't know their language, and I don't trust online translation tools to get the things into another language properly. It's that knitting jargon problem again. In many languages, where we say "knit" and "purl," they say "right" and "left." We say "stitch," but they might say "point." We say "row," but they might say "career"...
What I do know is that machine and hand knitters are incredibly generous about helping each other. I know that if someone makes a mess of a translation, another person can fix it, or another person can bring it to my attention.
Want to help? If you really want to jump-start some underserved knitters, would you be willing to translate or caption a favorite video or two? One that helped you, or perhaps one in the beginner series?
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I would be pleased to try my hand at adding captions.
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