Thanks to the efforts of a handful of volunteers, you can now find accurate closed captions in English for a few more of the Wilmette Institute’s Web Talks, including:
But we need more volunteers! The Institute is still working on closed captions for some twenty of its past Web Talks. And the number of Institute videos is growing fast. In addition to monthly Web Talks, many Wilmette Institute faculty members are recording multiple video lectures for their courses. Most of these videos for courses are not currently available to the public. Hence volunteers will have a chance to preview interesting course materials while honing skills in correcting closed captions. Right now we need to have subtitles corrected for a number of videos, including one on “Storytelling” (by Druzelle Cederquist for her course now in progress on
The Báb and Bahá’u’lláh: Two Lives, One Story) and several videos by Rob Stockman for his April 2017 course on
Christianity for Deepening and Dialogue.
Why are we looking for volunteers to help with closed captioning? Without human intervention, the auto-translated captions supplied by YouTube can be hilarious. For example, “Wilmette Institute” often becomes “woman Institute” (which, with no disrespect to the fairer sex, is somewhat off-topic for the Institute and its much broader mission). The following strange translations appeared in the first ten minutes of the Web Talk on
The Leaves of the Twin Divine Trees:
- [The Wilmette Institute has] “no idea how many people become behind as a result of Roman Institute classes” (should be “become Bahá’ís as a result of Wilmette Institute classes”).
- “Rudy kicked in” (should be “Ruhi kicked in”).
- “National Spiritual Assembly of the behind the United States” (should be “Bahá’ís of the United States).
- “an in-depth study of the lives of women closely related to the bob and voila” (should be “the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh”).
- “Qatari actos” (should be “Kitab-i-Aqdas”).
- “the most outstanding Harry of his dispensation” (should be “heroine of this Dispensation”).
- “it is rather cold to share fan be, the guardian” (should be “owed to Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian”).
If you have good typing skills and would like to join our subtitling team, please email the Wilmette Institute at
wi@usbnc.org.
