We added subtitles to our videos
We currently offer our software in 18 different European languages to ensure the greatest number of users and customers a user experience of our software in their native tongue.
Even if the internet and pop culture occasionally suggests otherwise, only a little more than a third of EU residents feel comfortable to hold a conversation in English*. This data is self reported and even this level of English proficiency may not suffice to master complex software tasks – even more so in printing with its wealth of historically accumulated lingo and phrases (elastic impression roller, furniture, mill the ink, yapp binding).
Since some time now, and with success, we produce and distribute videos about our software and the various features – but until now in English only. This we just improved and started to offer subtitles for our new and selected older videos to gain greater reach. We currently provide Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Polish, Russian and Spanish subtitles for some videos.
See for yourself: The following link starts a video about printing complex products (with Printgroove JT Compile) automatically defaulting to french subtitles (this only works if your Youtube environment is set to french, i.e. in France, but you get the idea): Video
Clicking the link above subtitles will default to languages according to location and environment:
- Russia - Russian
- France - French
- Germany - German
- English - French (weird, isn't it?)
If you are interested to get subtitles for one of our older videos, let us know on Twitter, we help, if we can: twitter.com/dotssoftware
For the technically inclined:
Share a Youtube video with automatic subtitles
Usually a user must activate subtitles manually on Youtube which requieres s/he is aware of the pertinent icon. With little URL pixie dust you can automate this (as of January 2014). This comes in handy when you want to share videos via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or any other service in the proper language.
Fetch the URL of any video with subtitles and add some parameters. For demo purposes we use the above mentioned link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF_J7uTINr4
This english videos has subtitles in German, French and Russian, we go for French again with the following parameters:
- Language hl=fr
- Language preference cc_lang_pref=fr
- Activate subs cc=1
This gives us the following string: &hl=fr&cc_lang_pref=fr&cc=1
Add this to the URL and we get this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF_J7uTINr4&hl=fr&cc_lang_pref=fr&cc=1
Try it and share the video with friends and family!
For German use de, for Russian use ru. And remember as mentioned above: This will not override the language environment of a Youtube user.
* See European Commission (2012): Europeans and their Languages, Special Report. The 38% for EU27 are on page 21.